Agricultural Landscapes: History, Status and Challenges -- Exploring Agricultural Landscapes: Recent Progress and Opportunities for Eurasia -- Optimizing Agricultural Landscapes: Measures Towards Prosperity and Sustainability -- The Russian Food Security Doctrine: Historical Roots and Major Limitations -- The Work of VV Dokuchaev in the Chernozem Zone of Russia: a Contribution to Productive and Sustainable Agrolandscapes, and a Basis for Recent Research -- Renewable Resources from Agriculture and Forestry - State of Use and Innovative Concepts in Germany -- Promising Agricultural Management Practices and Soil Threats in Europe and China -- Long-Term Field Experiments (LTEs) - Importance, Overview, Soil Organic Matter.

The book informs about agricultural landscapes, their features, functions and regulatory mechanisms. It characterizes agricultural production systems, trends of their development, and their impacts on the landscape. Agricultural landscapes are multifunctional systems, coupled with all nexus problems of the 21th century. This has led to serious discrepancies between agriculture and environment, and between urban and rural population. The mission, key topics and methods of research in order to understanding, monitoring and controlling processes in rural landscapes is being explained. Studies of international expert teams, many of them from Russia, demonstrate approaches towards both improving agricultural productivity and sustainability, and enhancing ecosystem services of agricultural landscapes. Scientists of different disciplines, decision makers, farmers and further informed people dealing with the evolvement of thriving rural landscapes are the primary audience of this book.