The IALE 2022 European Landscape Ecology Congress took place between 11-15 July. Originally scheduled as an in-person event in Warsaw, Poland, later it was changed to an online meeting due to the Russian invasion and the need to help refugees arriving in Poland. Under the conference motto "Making the future, learning from the past" international scientists and experts exchanged their views on landscape ecology as the transdisciplinary platform linking past, present and future.

At this time, when the globe is dealing with issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental pollution, mass migration, and urbanisation, this strategy is especially important. The core of landscape ecology is a holistic, landscape approach to the complex cultural-environmental systems that offers the ideal framework for integrating transdisciplinary tools and viewpoints to better understand the various phenomena and processes all around us and forecast and control them. Because of this, IALE 2022 wishes to take responsibility for establishing sustainable communities and landscapes in the future by learning from past experience and knowledge.

BESTMAP was represented with two presentations. In a session on "Finding future pathways for sustainable agricultural landscapes in Europe: concepts and empirical evidence in different European contexts", Tomas Vaclavik of Palacky University, Olomouc, CZ, presented BESTMAP's results on the derivation of Farming System Archetypes for modelling impacts of agricultural policies. In the same session, Meike Will of Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research UFZ, Leipzig, DE, gave a talk on the BESTMAP Agent-Based Models (ABM) where she highlighted how farmer decision-making on agri-environmental schemes can be included in agent-based models to evaluate policy designs.

The other session participants showed a great deal of interest in the BESTMAP findings and offered insightful commentary on the situation, which will help the models and analysis move forward.