In Memoriam of Francsco Di Castri (1930–2005)

Abstract

July 2005 the scientific community and we landscape ecologists have lost one of the most eminent and influential ecologists. He played a creative and leading role in numerous major international activities in scientific and environmental issues. Of the greatest significance and lasting impact on the future of natural and cultural landscapes were his contributions as the founding director of the Division of Ecological Sciences of UNESCO when he shaped and directed what came to be considered one of UNESCO’s principal contributions to promoting international cooperation on environmental issues within the framework of the MAB program. Together with Michael Battise he nurtured and developed the Biosphere Reserve concept. He furthered its worldwide implementation as the transdisciplinary basis for integrating the natural and social sciences and uniting academic researchers, planners, conservationists, and land managers to promote management and conservation of resources of the biosphere and its landscapes. In the same vein, he also initiated also the World Cultural Heritage Convention that became one of the most successful legal instruments for the conservation of the world-wide natural and cultural heritage landscapes. In our landscape ecology book (Naveh and Lieberman 1984, pages 326–330) we provided examples of some posters from the exhibition on ‘‘Ecology in Action‘‘ at the 10th anniversary international conference of the MAB program in September 1981 in Paris. The two volumes of invited contributions to this conference,‘‘Ecology in Practice’’ by Di Castri et al. (1984), taking stock of the results of 10-year research within MAB, became an important landmark on integrated ecosystem management and the solution of its problems. In this context Castri and Hadley (1979) claimed, rightly, that one of the major scientific bottlenecks to integrated natural resources management was the lack of a sound holistic conceptional basis for bridging between ecology and the natural sciences. In the preface to the Spanish edition of our landscape ecology book (Di Castri 2001), he regarded our Total Human Ecosystem concept as an important step in this direction. Francesco Di Castri had deep roots in the Mediterranean. He was born in Venice and studied at Milan and Padua. He started his professional carrier in 1961 as Professor of Ecological Sciences and Director of the Institute of Animal Production at the University of Santiago, and was then the founding Director of the Institute of Z. Naveh (&) Faculty of Civil and Environmental Egineering, Technion, Israel Intitue of Technology, Haifa 32 000, Israel e-mail: z.nave@hotmail.com Landscape Ecol (2007) 22:5–6 DOI 10.1007/s10980-006-9026-x