Abstract
As a consequence of widespread agricultural intensification, land abandonment and urbanization, most European landscapes are undergoing fundamental changes. The drivers and effects of these dynamics and possible approaches for guiding them (or at least coping with them) are addressed by two relatively distinct research communities dealing with the concepts of "cultural landscapes" and "resilience". This editorial introduces the key elements of the resilience approach and illustrates these in a landscape-related context. Incorporating the resilience perspective into landscape research sheds light on drivers and patterns of landscape change and illustrates opportunities for its constructive management. This will be dealt with in detail in the following three contributions to this special issue.