As a prelude to revising the Aims and Scope of Landscape and Urban Planning (LAND), our last editorial discussed the journal’s “intellectual landscape” as revealed by an analysis of conceptual and proximal relationships between articles published in LAND and 50 other research journals (Gobster & Xiang, 2012). The six conceptual themes we identified—ecology, planning and management, social science, sustainability science, design and engineering, and GIScience—help situate the journal within a diverse range of disciplines and professional fields. The closest ties between LAND and other journals, however, suggest that the over-arching concept of landscape provides a core concern for shared involvement. But does shared involvement equate to a shared understanding of the meanings of landscape? Diverse understandings across disciplines, methodological approaches, geographies, and cultures can deepen our grasp of the problems and issues we care about, but simply assuming that landscape is well understood lends an ambiguity to our endeavor as a journal community and as editors in guiding journal content in productive directions. In this editorial and a companion essay (Nassauer, 2012) immediately following it, we examine the problems and potentials of using landscape as an organizing concept for scholarship and practice.

1. Problems

First, these examples from our brief tenure as editors illustrate some problems we have encountered in understanding the appropriateness of new submissions within the journal’s aims and scope: