Ten years Center for Immersive Visualizations - Past, Present, and Future

Virtual Reality (VR) can be found in many fields. A majority of the time this involves the use of Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs). Their alternatives, large-scale immersive 3D screens and CAVE systems, can also be found in research and offer researchers high visual quality and collaborative VR experiences. This report covers the operation and learnings from maintaining a visualization center with large-scale immersive installations over the course of ten years

Wooded Grasslands as Part of the European Agricultural Heritage

Wooded grasslands have always played an important role in rural life with changing issues: They are of high importance for questions of biodiversity, soil, and water resources and in preserving agricultural heritage, but their maintenance is labor intensive. Abandoned wooded grasslands undergo succession, and food production alone does not support their survival. They require special attention and at the beginning a well-established subsidy system can help to contribute to their survival. Their sustainable use in the present-day landscapes can only be conceivable in complexity where food production, reintroduction of their cultural values, biodiversity and landscape protection, and ecotourism are playing an important role. This chapter gives an overview on the recent situation of wooded grasslands and their historical development, based on the work done by the Institute for Research on European Agricultural Landscapes (www.\u200beucalandnetwork.\u200beu). National pictures, definitions, history (including local names), threats, potentials, cultural values, spatial distributions, subtypes, and available databases have been collected, described, and analyzed. The main results of this survey are as follows: (1) Wooded grasslands are known to the public but mainly to local communities where they occur; (2) Many subtypes of wooded grasslands exist in various European countries; (3) Wooded grasslands underwent tremendous changes during the past centuries and lost their importance for various reasons; (4) There are many local and regional projects focusing on wooded grasslands, often as \u201clighthouse\u201d projects to valorise cultural achievements