Issue No. 13 of the Journal of Ecological Questions includes two groups of papers. The first group is composed of four papers and two short notes, in which problems discussed in the previous, i.e. the 12th Issue of EQ are continued. These problems concern the structure and functioning of historical and present-day landscapes with the contribution of heaths in the Tuchola Forest and the Toruń Basin. Out of six papers, one paper and two short notes are dedicated to vegetation. Three papers discuss the fauna of the Toruń Basin, the areas of which are also included within the Lower Vistula Valley. One of the faunistic papers deals with invertebrates, and more precisely - with the species diversity of wild long-tongued bees in the succession series, which is formed by heaths, young growths and mature fresh pine forests. Another paper discusses the species richness of all taxonomic groups of vertebrates recorded at present and in the past near the city of Toruń. The third paper is dedicated to the wolf population, which recently has recolonized forests and heaths of the Toruń Basin. In five articles of the latter group, different, more general but important problems are discussed, related to biology and ecology of miscellaneous taxonomic groups of plants and animals, as well as to various levels of nature organization. One of these articles presents life strategies of algae, another one discusses the ecology of social wasps. In the next article of the latter group of papers, ecologists from India present changes in the land cover and the land use caused by economic processes in the landscapes of the state Punjab. In order to evaluate the extent of the ongoing transformations, the technology of GIS and remote sensing was applied by the authors. Two subsequent papers deal with issues of nature philosophy. All papers included in the 13th issue of EQ enable a reader to get familiar with the research issues developed at the University of Toruń in cooperation with another scientific centres in Poland and abroad.