Most aspects of the structure and function of Earth’s ecosystems can no longer be understood without accounting for the strong, and often dominant influence of humanity across space and time. Human land-use practices in particular are fundamental determinants of local, regional, and global ecological processes. The consequences of such practices are evident across diverse scales influencing the sustainability of landscapes and ultimately the quality of human life. In this session we would like to address both the theory and the practice for achieving sustainable landscapes through comparisons between interdisciplinary researches in Southern Appalachia and the North-facing Western Pyrenees. This working group (3 hours) should bring together researchers from the Coweeta LTER, from the INRA of Toulouse and the University of Pau in France involved in long-term interdisciplinary research on land-uses practices. We will focus on the 25-year research legacy in Southern Appalachia and the North-facing Western Pyrenees to document the sustainability of landscapes, compare the research methods and backgrounds and learn from the research experiences in each country. Critical to our approach is the coordinated use of methodological and technical innovations for transferring and linking data from divergent spatial, temporal and analytical frameworks which could allow us to investigate long-term dynamics of biophysical-human systems over scales of time and space not possible by conventional approaches.