The start of 2015 marks several important developments for Landscape Research.
Firstly, we are delighted to announce the appointment of 3 new assistant editors, namely (in alphabetical order): Dr Federica Larcher of the Department of Agronomy, Forestry and Food Sciences, University of Torino (Italy), Dr Lisa Shillito of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, and Dr Penny Travlou of the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh. Lisa Shillito will also act as the journal’s first Social Media Editor.
Next, the journal is growing to 8 issues per year. This gives our new expanded editorial team a great opportunity to think strategically about how to develop the journal. We are looking forward to improving our efficiency and speed of response, as well as shaping the future impact of the journal in our exciting field of landscape research. In addition, whilst all accepted papers are currently published online via the iFirst system, providing authors with all necessary publication benefits, the expansion to 8 issues will mean that accepted papers are assigned to an issue more rapidly.
Finally, to mark the development and growth of the journal we have designed a new cover. We’ve gone for a cover that is graphically clean and contemporary, doing away with unnecessary text and using a single large image to evoke journal content. For the first cover we’ve chosen Ian Thompson’s photograph of the mining memorial at the lakeside in the Queen Elizabeth II Country Park at Woodhorn, near Ashington, Northumberland. Woodhorn Colliery was established in1894 by Ashington Coal Company and produced its first coal in 1901. The colliery started to decline in the 1960s and closed in 1981. The old colliery buildings were turned into a museum in 1989 after the country park was developed. The country park site was once one of the biggest colliery spoil heaps in Europe. The main feature of the park is the 16 hectare lake surrounded by developing woodland and open grassland. We chose this image because it incorporates multiple landscape perspectives and processes, including landscape and land use change and ephemerality, history and memorialisation, landscape as view and, in the foreground tyre tracks in the snow, the messiness of everyday landscape interactions. We are planning to change the image every year and will be seeking contributions for our future covers. We hope that they will demonstrate the range of representational approaches associated with landscape, and with the papers we publish, ranging from the artistic to the more technical.
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Anna Jorgensen, Managing Editor, Landscape Research