Landscape sustainability refers to the capacity of a landscape to consistently provide long-term, landscape-specific ecosystem services essential for maintaining and improving human well-being.  Landscape sustainability science (LSS) is a place-based, use-inspired science of understanding and improving the dynamic relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being in changing landscapes under uncertainties arising from internal feedbacks and external disturbances (e.g., climate change and land use change).  LSS also emphasizes significant between-landscape interactions and hierarchical linkages to both finer and broader scales.  LSS builds on and advances our understanding of the patterns and processes of coupled human-environment systems.

    The goal of this LSS forum series is to promote the theoretical development and its place-based applications, with a focus on the drylands of China and elsewhere in the world.  Key topics include sustainability, resilience, vulnerability, ecosystem services, land system design and modeling, and human well-being.  Each LSS Forum invites leading scientists in ecology, geography, environmental economics, and sustainability science, from around the world, to provide in-depth discussions on these key topics.  LSS Forum Series is intended to be an important platform to promote sustainability science in China and beyond.