19.03.2016		New cooperation with GeoGlobe. For further information read …here.
	21.01.2016		The SURE World Conference 2016 – Official Webpage is now online.
	21.01.2016		VIDEO  of the First International Symposium for Urban Ecology of the SURE  in Bogotá 8-10th September 2015
	25.11.2016		New topics for scientific theses added. Further information here.
	12.11.2015		Appointment of Prof. Dr. Breuste as honorary professor at the University of Bukarest …read more
	12.10.2015		3-year professorship for Prof. Dr. Jürgen Breuste at the East China Normal University …read more
			Research cooperation leads to environmental improvement: Argentine-Austrian research project supports practical environmental improvement in the agglomeration of Buenos Aires …read more
			China Centre for Urban Ecology (CCUE) holds the 1st International Symposium: The titel of the symposium: Practicing urban ecology for urban development – the case of Beijing …read more

Last annual URBES meeting in New York

In the course of the third and last project year of the URBES project all partners met in Aprila 2014 in New York at the New School. For the Salzburg team Dr. Annette Voigt joined the meeting.  Due to the well organisation by the New School New York the URBES meeting was successful and a range of project results and future activities have been discussed. One of the topics was to organize the writing of a URBES synthesis paper to synthesize the major learning outcomes from the URBES project with all URBES participants. A follow up 2 day in Brussels event is planned to hand over the URBES outcomes and recommendations to other existing projects and to inform key stakeholders.  Making the linkages to other networks and projects such as: Openness, Greensurge, ARTS, Phenotype, IPBES, Future Earth.

COST Action TU1201 Third Event in Lisbon/Portugal – March 19-22, 2014

The network of scientists from 31 European and non-European countries had participated in a joint Management Committee, Working Group and Core Group Meeting in Lisbon/Portugal. The local host was LNEC (National Laboratory for Civil Engineering). There was an opening session with a Welcome Adress and a Keynote:

Keynote: The Lisbon s Green Plan Implementation. A Strong Tool Towards a  New Urban Landscape (Duarte d ́Araújo Jorge Cardoso da Mata, Landscape Architect, Lisbon City Council Member)

There were National presentations:

• Community & Allotment Gardens in Israel (Avigail Heller – Ministry of Agriculture and rural development, Israel; Efrat Eizenberg – Architecture and Town Planning, Technion, Israel)
• Cultivation, Leisure Time and the Housing Market – An Overview of Urban Allotment Gardens in Austria Annette Voigt, University of Salzburg, Austria.
• Urban gardens in Spain: Insights from Barcelona, Madrid and Seville (aura Calvet-Mir, Marta Camps-Calvet, Erik Gómez-Baggethun, Marta Hernández, Irene Iniesta, Johannes Langemeyer, Hug March, Raúl Puente-Asuero)
• Urban community gardens in Cyprus. Background and recent trends (Byron Ioannou, Frederick University, Nicosia)

as well as presentation from the working groups. One focus was the work in the four parallel Working Group meetings. The meeting ended with a field trip to inter-city allotment gardens.

See: www.urbanallotments.eu

One of the outcomes of the COST Action TU1201 will be a book. The book aims to present an up to date picture of the various aspects, benefits and values associated with urban allotment gardening.

New paper by Prof. Breuste published: Breuste, J. (2014): Urban landscape Salzburg –the long way from myth to concept. In: C. Ferch und K. Luger (Hrsg.) (2014):  The threatened city. Strategies for human  buildings in Salzburg. Innsbruck, Studienverlag, S. 250 – 227. [in German]

Prof. Breuste takes part at Workshops on urban biodiversity and ecosystem services in Colombia

The Society for Urban Ecology (SURE) got the first initial start in Latina America with 3 workshops where Prof. Breuste (head of the RG Urban and Landscape Ecology, University Salzburg and SURE President) took part as an expert. SURE had together with EcoNat (Director Henry Garay Sarasti) und Instituto Humboldt (Director Brigitte Baptiste) a first workshop series in Colombia on „Urban biodiversity and Ecosystem Services”. EcoNat and Insituto Humboldt who organized the workshops and financed them, invited local stakeholders and academics to discuss these issues in general and for selected case studies. Colombia is a fast developing country and develops especially fast in urban areas. The target of the country is to support urban biodiversity strategies and secure and develop urban ecosystem services within this urbanization process.

Workshop 3 February 2014 in Baranquilla / Workshop 4 February 2014 in Medellin / Workshop 7 February 2014 in Bogotá

Several local stakeholders and experts who presented regional and project results related to the workshop subject. The SURE President Jürgen Breuste (Austria) and the SURE Brazil Chapter President Cecilia Herzog (Brazil) were invited as international experts, reporting about international and regional urban ecological strategies and results.

The workshops were excellently organized and very successful. The discussions showed the already reached high level of ecosystem management but also the still existing problems like combination of utilization and protection in fast developing cities, status of urban nature of different kinds (from nature remnants to succession land and forestry). The most important is for SURE that the subject Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services is already accepted as target in the urban development process and that it is to develop nature for urban people in their surrounding from which they can profit from. SURE will further support the cooperation and will send the first SURE trainee Kerstin Huber from Technical University Dresden in April for a SURE Internship to the Insituto Humboldt to Bogotá.

Prof. Breuste holds a Keynote-talk at the symposium „Good live with nature in the Zwischenstadt“. In the course of this talk was also this paper published: Breuste, J. (2014): Living in the Zwischenstadt. In: Die Furche, 70. Jg. 6. März 2014, 6. [both downloads are in German]

Download Keynote 

Download „Die Furche“

The WG Urban and Landscape Ecology is presented with four papers in the special issue published in the course of the URBES project.

Haase, D. Larondelle, N.; Andersson, E. Artmann, M.; Borgström, S.; Breuste, J.; Gomez-Baggethun, E.; Gren,Ä.; Hamstead, Z.; Hansen, R.; Kabisch, N.; Kremer, P.; Langemeyer, J.; Lorance Rall, E.; McPhearson, T.; Pauleit, S.; Qureshi,S.; Schwarz, N.; Voigt, A.; Wurster, D.; Elmqvist, T.; (2014). A Quantitative Review of Urban Ecosystem Service Assessments: Concepts, Models, and Implementation. In: AMBIO, 43(4): 413-433.

Wurster, D.; Artmann, M. (2014). Development of a Concept for Non-monetary Assessment of Urban Ecosystem Services at the Site Level. In: AMBIO, 43(4): 454-465.

Voigt, A.; Kabisch, N.; Wurster, D.; Haase, D.; Breuste, J. (2014): Structural Diversity: A Multi-dimensional Approach to Assess Recreational Services in Urban Parks. In: AMBIO, 43(4): 480-491.

Artmann, M. (2014). Assessment of soil sealing management responses, strategies and targets towards ecologically sustainable urban land use management. In: AMBIO, 43(4): 530-541.

All papers can be seen at:

http://link.springer.com/journal/13280/43/4/page/1