Sustainable landscapes in central Romania

This book is addressed at people with a direct stake in the future of Southern Transylvania: at local and regional politicians, policy makers, non-government organisations, school teachers, and other engaged local people. Readers from these groups will differ in their formal training, and many will not be used to reading research reports. For this reason, this book is not a standard research report. To the best of our ability, we have taken care to avoid technical language, and have tried to share our findings in a way that is no more complicated than it needs to be. The technical terms we could not avoid are explained in a glossary at the end of the book. However, we also appreciate that some readers will be looking for more depth, or additional information related to our work. For this group of people, we have provided references to the original research papers on which this book is based at the end of every chapter, as well as a list of suggested further readings at the end of the book. Our research addressed the interplay of social and ecological changes taking place in Southern Transylvania today. To that end, we explored local ecosystems in depth, and we spoke with many local people about the changes that are currently taking place. The goal of our research was to understand how the relationship between people and nature is changing, and what this, in turn, means for the future of the region.