Abstract The International Landscape Ecology Conference on “Landscape Structures, Functions and Management: Response to Global Ecological Change” hosted by the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology, Mendel University in Brno and the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic) in association with the Czech regional chapter of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (CZ-IALE), and supported by the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic, was held from September 3–7, 2010 in Brno, Czech Republic. At 9 parallel symposia of this meeting, 107 oral presentations (including 10 keynote speeches) and 64 posters by representatives from 19 countries were presented. The primary goals of the conference were to provide a forum for the dissemination and discussion of recent research findings, to explore future directions for water management at the landscape level and to foster interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers of all ages and from many countries. This editorial briefly describes the conference, which served as the source of the selected papers, and explains the main aspects of these papers. It highlights papers on issues related to water management under changing climate and land use at landscape and watershed levels, presented mostly at the session on functional water management through land use change.