During its existence the Ecosciences Panel of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was constantly concerned with (i) the communic ation gap between the generators of ecological/environmental infor mation and those who use it and (ii) the narrow interpretation of 'environmental' which too frequently was taken as being synonymous with pollution. Because of this concern, and because the panel recognised that land-use is perhaps the overriding facet of environmental policy it was decided to arrange the Seminar recorded in this volume :- Land and its Uses : Actual and Potential An Environmental Appraisal The development of this Seminar was chaired by Professor F. T. Last who was enthusiastically supported by B. G. Bell (U.K.), Drs S. Bie (Norway), 0. W. Heal (U.K.), R. Herrmann (Federal Republic of Germany), M.C.B.Hotz (formerly of NATO, Belgium, but now in Canada), L. Munn (Canada) and N. Yassoglou (Greece). Together, they decided that the participants should include (i) planners/decision makers and (ii) scientists generating ecological/environmental infor mation, in the hope that they would gain a better understanding of each others problems and attitudes and as a result identify how information can be prepared in a more usable form.

The State of the World's Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture is FAO's first flagship publication on the global status of land and water resources. It is an 'advocacy' report, to be published every three to five years, and targeted at senior level decision makers in agriculture as well as in other sectors. SOLAW is aimed at sensitizing its target audience on the status of land resources at global and regional levels and FAO's viewpoint on appropriate recommendations for policy formulation. SOLAW focuses on these key dimensions of analysis: (i) quantity, quality of land and water resources, (ii) the rate of use and sustainable management of these resources in the context of relevant socio-economic driving factors and concerns, including food security and poverty, and climate change. This is the first time that a global, baseline status report on land and water resources has been made. It is based on several global spatial databases (e.g. land suitability for agriculture, land use and management, land and water degradation and depletion) for which FAO is the world-recognized data source. Topical and emerging issues on land and water are dealt with in an integrated rather than sectoral manner. The implications of the status and trends are used to advocate remedial interventions which are tailored to major farming systems within different geographic regions.

The two-volume set LNCS 8802 and LNCS 8803 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation, ISoLA 2014, held in Imperial, Corfu, Greece, in October 2014. The total of 67 full papers was carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. Featuring a track introduction to each section, the papers are organized in topical sections named: evolving critical systems; rigorous engineering of autonomic ensembles; automata learning; formal methods and analysis in software product line engineering; model-based code generators and compilers; engineering virtualized systems; statistical model checking; risk-based testing; medical cyber-physical systems; scientific workflows; evaluation and reproducibility of program analysis; processes and data integration in the networked healthcare; semantic heterogeneity in the formal development of complex systems. In addition, part I contains a tutorial on automata learning in practice; as well as the preliminary manifesto to the LNCS Transactions on the Foundations for Mastering Change with several position papers. Part II contains information on the industrial track and the doctoral symposium and poster session.