Modern city dwellers are largely detached from the environmental effects of their daily lives. The sources of the water they drink, the food they eat, and the energy they consume are all but invisible, often coming from other continents, and their waste ends up in places beyond their city boundaries. Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems shows how cities and their residents can begin to reintegrate into their bioregional environment, and how cities themselves can be planned with nature’s organizing principles in mind. Taking cues from living systems for sustainability strategies, Newman and Jennings reassess urban design by exploring flows of energy, materials, and information, along with the interactions between human and non-human parts of the system. Drawing on examples from all corners of the world, the authors explore natural patterns and processes that cities can emulate in order to move toward sustainability. Some cities have adopted simple strategies such as harvesting rainwater, greening roofs, and producing renewable energy. Others have created biodiversity parks for endangered species, community gardens that support a connection to their foodshed, and pedestrian-friendly spaces that encourage walking and cycling. A powerful model for urban redevelopment, Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems describes aspects of urban ecosystems from the visioning process to achieving economic security to fostering a sense of place.

Modern city dwellers are largely detached from the environmental effects of their daily lives. The sources of the water they drink, the food they eat, and the energy they consume are all but invisible, often coming from other continents, and their waste ends up in places beyond their city boundaries. Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems shows how cities and their residents can begin to reintegrate into their bioregional environment, and how cities themselves can be planned with nature’s organizing principles in mind. Taking cues from living systems for sustainability strategies, Newman and Jennings reassess urban design by exploring flows of energy, materials, and information, along with the interactions between human and non-human parts of the system. Drawing on examples from all corners of the world, the authors explore natural patterns and processes that cities can emulate in order to move toward sustainability. Some cities have adopted simple strategies such as harvesting rainwater, greening roofs, and producing renewable energy. Others have created biodiversity parks for endangered species, community gardens that support a connection to their foodshed, and pedestrian-friendly spaces that encourage walking and cycling. A powerful model for urban redevelopment, Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems describes aspects of urban ecosystems from the visioning process to achieving economic security to fostering a sense of place.

Future Sustainable Ecosystems: Complexity, Risk, Uncertainty provides an interdisciplinary, integrative overview of environmental problem-solving using statistics. It shows how statistics can be used to solve diverse environmental and socio-economic problems involving food, water, energy scarcity, and climate change risks. It synthesizes interdisciplinary theory, concepts, definitions, models and findings involved in complex global sustainability problem-solving, making it an essential guide and reference. It includes real-world examples and applications making the book accessible to a broader interdisciplinary readership. Discussions include a broad, integrated perspective on sustainability, integrated risk, multi-scale changes and impacts taking place within ecosystems worldwide. State-of-the-art statistical techniques, including Bayesian hierarchical, spatio-temporal, agent-based and game-theoretic approaches are explored. The author then focuses on the real-world integration of observational and experimental data and its use within statistical models.

This book presents a multidimensional approach by providing a state of the art on EIS ecosystems, as well as structural and changing dynamics and its impact on citizens’ quality of life. It provides a set of international benchmarking case studies on good practices and initiatives aimed at creating and fostering EIS ecosystems. It shows how these international benchmarks can be replicated to foster the creation of entrepreneurial and innovative units and promote sustainable practices, under an open innovation paradigm, which conjoins the participation of both public and private stakeholders, using co-creation, transparency and participatory budget practices the jointly improve accountability and public management. This book is a true reference guide for scholars, policy makers and practitioners interested on entrepreneurship, public procurement, innovation and sustainability engaged in building EIS ecosystems, which can enhance citizens’ quality of life.

This open access book surveys the frontier of scientific river research and provides examples to guide management towards a sustainable future of riverine ecosystems. Principal structures and functions of the biogeosphere of rivers are explained; key threats are identified, and effective solutions for restoration and mitigation are provided. Rivers are among the most threatened ecosystems of the world. They increasingly suffer from pollution, water abstraction, river channelisation and damming. Fundamental knowledge of ecosystem structure and function is necessary to understand how human acitivities interfere with natural processes and which interventions are feasible to rectify this. Modern water legislation strives for sustainable water resource management and protection of important habitats and species. However, decision makers would benefit from more profound understanding of ecosystem degradation processes and of innovative methodologies and tools for efficient mitigation and restoration. The book provides best-practice examples of sustainable river management from on-site studies, European-wide analyses and case studies from other parts of the world. This book will be of interest to researchers in the field of aquatic ecology, river system functioning, conservation and restoration, to postgraduate students, to institutions involved in water management, and to water related industries.

The City is an Ecosystem maps an interdisciplinary, community-engaged response to the great ecological crises of our time—climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality—which pose particular challenges for cities, where more than half the world’s population currently live. Across more than twenty chapters, the three parts of the book cover historical and scientific perspectives on the city as an ecosystem; human rights to the city in relation to urban sustainability; and the city as a sustainability classroom at all educational levels inside and outside formal classroom spaces. It argues that such efforts must be interdisciplinary and widespread to ensure an informed public and educated new generation are equipped to face an uncertain future, particularly relevant in the post-COVID-19 world. Gathering multiple interdisciplinary and community-engaged perspectives on these environmental crises, with contemporary and historical case study discussions, this timely volume cuts across the humanities and social and health sciences, and will be of interest to policymakers, urban ecologists, activists, built environment professionals, educators, and advanced students concerned with the future of our cities.

This volume examines the applicability of nature-based solutions in ecological restoration practice and in contemporary landscape architecture by bringing together ecology and architecture in the built environment. Green infrastructure is used to address urban challenges such as climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and stormwater management. In addition, thermal comfort nature-based solutions reintroduce critical connections between natural and urban systems. In light of ongoing developments in sustainable urban development, the goal is a paradigm shift towards a landscape that restores and rehabilitates urban ecosystems. The ten contributions to this book examine a wide range of successful cases of designing healthier, greener and more resilient landscapes in different geographical contexts, from the United States of America and Brazil, through various European regions, to Singapore and China. While some chapters attempt to conceptualize the interconnections between cities and nature, others clearly have an empirical focus. Therefore, this volume provides a rich body of work and acts as a starting point for further studies on restoration of ecosystems and integrative policies such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

In the latter part of the 20th century, humans are doing a particularly poor job of managing natural resources in a sustainable way over the long term. Institutions, Ecosystems and sustainability focuses on long term, sustainable natural resource management practices at the local, national, and international levels. The authors suggest that a major cause of the "sustainability problem" lie in "scale" problems. Large scale ecosystems are not simply larger versions of smaller systems, and micro-scale ecosystems are not merely microcosims of large scale systems. The driving forces and feedback mechanisms operate at different levels and exhibit distinct patterns of their own. The challenge is to match ecosystems and governance systems in ways that maximize the compatibility of these systems. This book builds upon this fundamental principle. Particularly valuable is the use of simulation exercises to explore the consequences of social institutions and a discussion of the progress being made in developing a broad global data base to test hypotheses about the relationship between ecosystems and social institutions, and to investigate ways to repair the damage already caused by scale mismatches.

This volume presents theoretical and empirical research on universities and their entrepreneurial ecosystems to better grasp the connections between universities and their surrounding environments and their engagement with sustainability. The book provides a better understanding of the entrepreneurial characteristics of universities. It examines the ways in which universities’ collaboration and participation in an ecosystem support business and industry transformation. It also investigates how universities function within the university/industry/government/third sector relationship nexus. The book enables the systematisation of the literature while simultaneously builds theory, empirically testing existing theories, and contributes towards a future research agenda geared towards sustainability. The book gathers contributions from varied geographical contexts providing an international perspective.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Geo-Informatics in Resource Management and Sustainable Ecosystem, GRMSE 2014, held in Ypsilanti, MI, China, in December 2014. The 73 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 296 submissions. The papers are divided into topical sections on smart city in resource management and sustainable ecosystem; spatial data acquisition through RS and GIS in resource management and sustainable ecosystem; ecological and environmental data processing and management; advanced geospatial model and analysis for understanding ecological and environmental process; applications of geo-informatics in resource management and sustainable ecosystem.