Applications for the LRG 2025 Research Fund are now open!
At LRG we believe that research has a vital role to play in realising a fairer, ethical and more sustainable future, in terms of the relationships that people have with the places they live and the environments they share with each other and with other living things. We wish to ensure that research can play this role in the fullest possible way.
Established in 2017 to mark LRG’s 50th anniversary, the Research Fund continues to support a select number of high-quality projects each year.
We are proud to set out 2025’s theme below. As always, we particularly encourage applications from early-career researchers and practitioners across all landscape-related fields, especially those that emphasise collaboration and knowledge exchange.
Please note that applicants must be LRG members. If you’re not yet a member of our thriving landscape community, you can join here.
Landscape and Mobility: Understanding movements of people, species, and ecosystems in the Anthropocene
In an era of unprecedented global change, understanding the dynamics of landscapes and mobility has never been more critical. The world is facing complex and interrelated challenges – climate change, conflicts, population shifts, and economic pressures – that are reshaping both human and non-human systems. While movement has always been a fundamental aspect of ecology and landscape studies, the Anthropocene introduces new patterns, pressures, and uncertainties. As researchers, we must embrace dynamism as an integral part of today’s challenges complexities and integrate it more fully into our scholarship and practice.
Mobility patterns worldwide are evolving due to various factors and at various scales, so mobility research can range from the day-to-day commuting that is an essential part of life to disruptive displacements caused by war, environmental crises, and socio-political upheavals. Mobility research can also tackle the aspect of time and temporality as a cornerstone for its critical discourses and theorisations. Mobility is not limited to humans; it also encompasses the movement of species, ecosystems, and cultural practices, all of which shape and transform our landscapes.
The 2025 LRG Research Fund will support applications that explore:
- Climate Migration: Research on the migration of both humans and non-humans as a result of climate change and its impact on landscapes and ecosystems.
- Mobility Injustices: Studies on contemporary or historically embedded mobility injustices in landscapes, whether emerging now or anticipated in the future. This includes mobility restrictions related to disability, age, ethnicity, religion, political circumstances, war, and other factors.
- Tourism and Temporary Mobilities: Projects examining tourism as a form of temporary mobility and its socio-spatial impacts on landscapes, as well as how tourism shifts our understanding of space and place, economic structures, community identities and cultural heritages.
- Mobility and Heritage: Research at the intersection of mobility and heritage studies—both natural and cultural heritage—exploring the role of mobilities—both past and present—in shaping contemporary heritage. This can include critical discussions on the integration of various heritage values and viewpoints of mobile communities and temporalities such as refugees, pastoral and tribal communities, and other mobile groups.
- Ecological Mobility: Investigation into ecological mobility within and between landscapes, including the differing scales and temporalities of ecosystem change, biodiversity gain, and the accelerated need to assist with rapid landscape change through design and management.
- Innovative Research Methods: Projects that explore new methodological approaches to studying mobility in landscapes and mobile landscapes. This may include ethnographic, visual, and digital methods, as well as creative and participatory techniques such as physical and digital mobilities, artistic mobilities, walking interviews, mobile participant engagement, GIS and technological tools and programs, and drawing as research tools. Additionally, research that critically examines immobility and stasis as part of the mobility discourse is encouraged.
- Policy and Practice: Research that informs the development and implementation of policies, practices, and actions addressing landscape mobility.
We invite researchers from diverse disciplines to contribute to this critical and evolving field, fostering a deeper understanding of mobility’s role in shaping our changing landscapes in the Anthropocene 🌏
For more information on this year’s theme, eligibility and available funding, download the full criteria using the button below.
Application deadline – 15th May 2025
Useful Resources
This recording is from a 2022 workshop led by Professors Karen Jones and Ian Mell, exploring the key characteristics of a successful funding application
Summaries of previous LRG-funded projects.
We will be hosting an LRG Research Showcase, featuring projects funded in both 2022 and 2023. To register your interest to join this event, please click to the right.
