Taking stock

In January 2019, almost a year before COVID-19 entered popular parlance, I wrote my first editorial for Landscape Research as the incoming Editor-in-Chief. I anchored that editorial to the theme of “change” and declared that changes were both “inevitable and necessary” (Waterton et al., 2022, p. 2) for a journal such as this, particularly given the length of time Landscape Research has been in operation. Within the year, the changes I had been referring to had been vastly overshadowed by the far bigger challenges of the pandemic, which quickly and inevitably affected almost every aspect of the journal’s operations. Everyone connected with the journal—authors, reviewers, the editorial team, and our colleagues at Taylor and Francis—had to adjust their established working practices in response to the converging pressures of health, home, and work. At the same time, many of us found ourselves simultaneously dealing with significant and rapid changes to the earth’s climate and the politics that surround it. My own experiences of such crises were largely delivered via Australia’s climate emergencies where, as Tony Birch (2020, p. 27) writes, we were living in a “storm of our own making”: fighting the development of new mines, grappling with soil exhaustion, gaping at drying rivers, hurtling from fires to floods, and witnessing the disappearance of at least three species—a bat, a rodent, and a skink (Muir, Wehner, & Newell, 2020). In the summer of 2019/2020, my family was forced to evacuate our fire-encircled home as unprecedented bushfires devoured more than 60% of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area to the west of Sydney. Three months later we found ourselves surrounding that same home with sandbags as nearly 400 mm of rain fell on us in a single weekend.

In retrospect, these were not the best circumstances in which to take on the role and responsibilities of Editor-in-Chief for Landscape Research! And the world continued to change. To borrow from Nick Mansfield, decisions we had already made kept arising “out of our past” and coming “at us from the future” (cited in Rose, 2013, p. 213). Unsurprisingly, the editorial work involved in steering a journal as large, prominent, and established as Landscape Research never got any easier. In fact, it became rather more complex with the acceleration of each new crisis. The last four years have thus at times felt very long and yet they have also passed in a flash. This is my fifth and final editorial as Editor-in-Chief; change, after all, is inevitable and necessary. As I look back over my tenure and inspect it for its failures and successes, it is probably fair to say that there is a lingering feeling of discontent. My time as Editor-in-Chief has unfolded in ways that look radically different to the plans I had started to formulate in 2019. Yet, overall, I shall remember it as being a largely rewarding experience. This is because although many crises punctuated my time at the helm of Landscape Research, those same ruptures also presented me with opportunities to rethink some of our editorial practices through the lens of ‘care’. I commenced this rethinking in close collaboration with Trustees of the Landscape Research Group and detailed updates on our efforts have been published in two editorials (Vicenzotti & Waterton, 2021; Waterton et al., 2022). Ultimately, our ambition has been to push back against some of the more destructive practices prevalent in academic publishing and instead ask those contributing to the journal to adopt a more care-full approach, both in terms of encouraging a more generous peer review process (Vicenzotti & Waterton, 2021) and ensuring the adoption of inclusive writing in the manuscripts that we publish (Waterton et al., 2022; see also Inclusive Practices: Language and Writing¹). To have the opportunity to shape a journal like Landscape Research, and play a role in the development of these important initiatives, has been an incredible privilege.

We recently extended our efforts to instil an “ethos of care” in the journal’s working practices by focussing on the provision of more supportive publishing pathways for emerging researchers. Alongside the creation of the new role of Academic Support Editor in 2021 (see Waterton et al., 2022 for more detail on this role), our prioritisation of support for emerging researchers going forward will be achieved primarily through the curation of a special issue of the journal that will assemble and showcase the vibrant and diverse contributions of new voices in the field of landscape studies. That special issue, to be published in 2024, will be guest edited by three members of the journal’s editorial team: Vanicka Arora (Pre-Editor, Peer Review), Paul Brindley (Academic Support Editor), and myself. Drawing from Vanicka’s experiences with a similar initiative by the journal Disaster Prevention and Management, our ambition with this special issue is to develop and support the academic writing skills of a range of scholars who have not yet had the opportunity to establish for themselves an extensive record of outputs, but who are in the process of building one (i.e. PhD candidates, recent graduates, researchers that have recently moved from a different kind of career to academia, etc.). We aim to do this by pairing authors with both an established academic mentor as well as a fellow author also contributing to the special issue (see Hendriks, Kmoch, Mulder, & Fuentealba, 2022). This support will be in addition to the guidance provided by the issue’s guest editors, with much of the mentoring, reading, advising, and commenting expected to take place across 2023 and 2024. Importantly, the authors of each of the papers selected for inclusion in the issue will also receive a small amount of financial support in the form of a £200 honorarium generously provided by the Landscape Research Group. Our call for expressions of interest, which closed in early 2023, received 90 submissions. This suggests that there is a strong appetite for mentoring and support from emerging researchers, particularly that which focuses on the requirements of academic publishing. It is thus an area of support that I will continue to develop during the final year of my tenure.

The year 2022 in brief

In many ways, 2022 was a very good year. Our submissions remained steady, with the largest numbers of manuscripts coming from China, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Italy, and the United States. We recorded a twenty percent increase in article downloads, growing to 189,000 annual downloads/views in 2022. Full downloads by country and region put the United Kingdom at the top of our list, followed by the United States, China, the Netherlands, and Australia. In terms of our efficiencies, we are currently averaging 18 days from submission to first decision and 133 days from submission to first post-review decision, which is only slightly slower than 2021. The Production Team at Taylor and Francis continues to move accepted articles to online publication quickly, with our average sitting at 18 days. Perhaps the biggest challenge remains finding reviewers with the capacity to commit to the peer-review process. We know we are not alone in this regard. Nonetheless, authors submitting to the journal remain satisfied with our processes. The results of our latest satisfaction survey reveal that the journal sits above Taylor and Francis averages with a rating of 8.8 out of 10 for overall satisfaction and 9.0 out of 10 for satisfaction with our peer review process.

In addition to our general issue papers, 2022 saw the publication of four special issues: “Landscape and Education: Politics of/in Practices” (Issue 2; see Cisani et al. 2022); “David Lowenthal’s Archipelagic and Transatlantic Landscapes” (Issue 4; see Olwig, 2022a); “Landscape Justice, Place and Quality of Life in ‘Archipelagic’ Worlds” (Issue 6; see Olwig, 2022b), and “City as Archive” (Issue 7; see Raynor, 2022). A number of these special issues produced articles that now feature in our Most Downloaded Article list for the past 12 months and our Trending list, which showcases articles with the highest Altmetric scores. The current year, 2023, will see the publication of a new suite of special issues tackling a range of issues, with themes that include: “Embracing Change in Infrastructure Landscapes”, “Rethinking the Green City”, and “Memorial Landscapes and Contestation”. It will also see the further development of special issues such as: “Whose Collective Voice? Conflicting and Shared Values in Defining Landscapes”, “Conservation and Multispecies Relations in the Making of Contemporary European Tourism Environments”, “Art and Artists in Landscape and Environmental Research Today”, and “New Futures for Satoyama - Innovation in Policy and Practice to Sustain Cultural Landscapes”, as well as the launch of a call for contributions for a special issue on the topic of “Landscapes and Care”.

Looking forward

Changes to the editorial team

In January 2024, the journal’s editorship will transition into a new pair of hands. Professor Hannes Palang, Head of the Centre for Landscape and Culture at Tallinn University, Estonia, will take on the role of Editor-in-Chief. Many readers of the journal will be familiar with Hannes’ research and contributions to the study of landscape, which has a particular focus on the history, planning and perceptions of Estonian landscapes. He has been a frequent contributor to Landscape Research, as a reviewer, author, and guest editor. He has also been a Trustee of the Landscape Research Group since 2009, and for the past few years has held the role of Research Coordinator, through which he has encouraged greater synchronicity between the Group’s research agenda and the work of this journal. The rest of the Editorial Team will remain as it was in 2022, which saw Dr Helen Hoyle (University of Sheffield) and Dr Gillian Lawson (Lincoln University) joining Andrew Butler (SLU) as Associate Editors, Mark Eischeid (University of Oregon), Federica Larcher (University of Turin), Bo Yang (University of Arizona) and Stephen Livesley (University of Melbourne) in the roles of Assistant Editor, Dr Paul Brindley (University of Sheffield) as the journal’s Academic Support Officer, Dr Laura Menatti (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research) as Book Review Editor, Dr Zannah Matson (University of Guelph) as Social Media Editor, and Dr Hayley Saul (University of York) and Dr Vanicka Arora (University of Stirling) in the roles of Pre-Editor. Editorial support for the journal and its operations will continue to be provided by the brilliant team at Yellowback, and particularly Madeleine Hatfield and Catherine Bentley.

Announcements and updates

Best paper prizes

I am delighted to use this editorial to announce the recipients of the journal’s two annual “best paper” awards, both of which come with a £250.00 prize: (1) the best paper prize; and (2) the best paper by an early career researcher prize. The aim of these awards is to celebrate high-quality published work in Landscape Research. Selection for these awards is a two-stage process. For the Best Paper Prize, all papers published in the journal in the previous twelve-month period will automatically be eligible for consideration. Our selection process begins with an annual call to the journal’s International Editorial Advisory Board, who are asked to submit nominations for the paper/papers they see as being of particular significance. The nominations received from the International Editorial Advisory Board are then used to form a shortlist from which a committee composed of three members of the Editorial Team selects an overall winner. In the event a member of the committee identifies and declares a conflict of interest, the committee will seek additional input from a fourth independent reviewer. For the Best Paper by an Early Career Researcher Prize, we ask all eligible authors to self-nominate, thereby creating a list of eligible submissions from which the same committee selects an overall winner. While there is no limit on the number of authors on an article considered for the “best paper” prize, the “best paper by an early career researcher” may only be awarded to an article with not more than two authors, the first of which must have been an early career researcher at the date of submission.

I am very pleased to announce that the recipients of the 2022 best paper awards are as follows:

Best Paper: Anastasia Baka and Leslie Mabon (2022) Assessing equality in neighbourhood availability of quality greenspace in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom, Landscape Research, 47(5): 584–587. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2022.2051458.

and

Best Paper by an Early Career Researcher: Emily Shakespeare and Jane Russell-O’Connor (2022) A biographical approach to Ireland’s landscape: Creating a new methodology, Landscape Research, 47(1): 10–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2021.1979498.

Both articles are currently freely available online.

Commissioned essay

Each year, Landscape Research invites applications for a small grant of up to £2,000 to support the production of a peer-reviewed essay on a nominated theme. The call for the 2022 commissioned essay focussed on the topic of “landscapes of care” and resulted in many high-quality abstracts. Selected authors are currently working on their essays, with publication anticipated in early 2024. As noted earlier in this editorial, the theme of “care” closely aligns with our collective goal to enact an ethos of care in the journal’s editorial work, as well as to think and write with, and through, care. It is also the theme of the Landscape Research Group’s Research Fund for 2023. Through both the current work of the editorial team and via my connections with the Landscape Research Group, I feel confident saying that, as a group, we have been encouraged by the ways that relations of care bind us together in more-than-human relations and allow us to think beyond extractive and exploitative practices. We hope that the scholarship produced through this call will further articulate these connections, help clarify directions for future inquiry, and support care-full landscape research.

Book review forums

Last year we introduced a new addition to the journal’s publishing formats: the Book Review Forum. The next two book forums will be published this year. The first will focus on Max Liboiron’s 2021 monograph, Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press). The second will focus on Landscape Citizenships, edited by Tim Waterman, Jane Wolff, and Ed Wall, and published in 2021 by Routledge. Authors interested in proposing a book (monograph or edited) for a future forum are encouraged to reach out to Dr Laura Menatti, our Book Review Editor.

Landscape Research at fifty

As many readers will know, the Landscape Research Group was established in 1967 with the aim of promoting the “study of and research into the landscape” (Shuttleworth, 2017, p. S5). To support their ambition, members of the Landscape Research Group launched a newsletter called Landscape Research News, which they envisioned as being “… a forum for the exchange of information between all those whose work may be concerned in some way with the landscape as human environment” (Landscape Research News 1(1), cited in Shuttleworth, 2017, p. S27). First published in 1968, the newsletter changed its name to Landscape Research in 1976, at which point it was reimagined as an academic journal. This adoption of a new name and the transition of a newsletter into an academic format occurred almost fifty years ago. 2026 will thus mark the journal’s fiftieth anniversary, a half-century achievement that will no doubt be celebrated by both the Landscape Research Group and members of the journal’s editorial team. Watch this space for announcements about how we plan to celebrate the occasion of the journal’s 50th anniversary, as well as calls to contribute to anniversary events and activities!

I would like to close my final editorial with a note of thanks to the Landscape Research Group for placing their trust in me over the past four years (and the coming year), and to the journal’s Editorial Team for providing me with such tremendous and committed assistance. Though immensely challenging, it has been an enormous privilege to work alongside so many people to support the scholarly contributions of those who share the intellectual ambitions of Landscape Research.

Notes

1 See https://landscaperesearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Inclusive_Practices.pdf.