The year of 2007 marks the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE) and the 20th anniversary of the founding of the journal, Landscape Ecology. In 1982, IALE was established in Piestany, Slovakia, primarily as a result of the concerted efforts by European ecologists and geographers to promote landscape research around the world. In 1987, Landscape Ecology—the official journal of IALE— was launched in cooperation with IALE as well as INTECOL (International Association for Ecology). Under the able and visionary leadership of the founding Editor-in-Chief, Frank B. Golley (Turner et al. 2007) and with the support of an elite group of editorial board members from Europe and North America, the journal started on a sound foundation. The field of landscape ecology was born as an interdisciplinary science. Carl Troll (1939, 1971) envisioned landscape ecology as the integration between ecological and geographic disciplines, and defined it as ‘‘the study of the main complex causal relationships between the life communities and their environment’’ which ‘‘are expressed regionally in a definite distribution pattern (landscape mosaic, landscape pattern)’’ (Troll 1971). As I have argued elsewhere (Wu 2006; Wu and Hobbs 2007), Troll’s conceptualization of landscape ecology embraced both the biophysical and pattern-process perspective and the holistic and humanistic perspective. These two perspectives have certainly been substantially expanded and fine-grained especially in the past 25 years. Most of the advances in theory and practice have been well reflected in the pages of the journal, Landscape Ecology. Indeed, the most salient and unambiguous goal of Landscape Ecology, since day one, has been to promote interdisciplinary and integrative studies of landscapes, especially on broad scales, not only to improve our understanding of the world of landscapes, but also to provide solutions to the plethora of problems occurring in our landscapes. In the inaugural issue of Landscape Ecology, Golley (1987) made this quite clear: ‘‘The task of correcting biospheric disorder is a universal activity, requiring information and insight from all. We intend that Landscape Ecology have this broad objective and that it be relevant to the problems that face mankind at the end of the twentieth century.’’ This interdisciplinary theme was the highlight of the most recent world congress of IALE–the 7th World Congress on Landscape Ecology, held in Wageningen, The Netherlands during July 8 and 12, 2007. During the past 20 years, the journal has flourished with a steady increase in the scope, depth, quantity, and quality of published articles, thanks to the outstanding service of the Editors-in-Chief—Frank Golley (1987–1996), Robert Gardner (1997–1999), J. Wu (&) School of Life Sciences and Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-4501, USA e-mail: Jingle.Wu@asu.edu