Owing to complex direct and indirect effects, impacts of higher trophic levels on plants is poorly understood. In tropical agroecosystems, ants interact with crop mutualists and antagonists, but little is known about how this integrates into the final ecosystem service, crop yield. We combined ant exclusion and introduction of invasive and native-dominant species in cacao agroecosystems to test...

The value of digital services is increasingly recognized by owners of digital platforms. These services have central role in building and sustaining the business of the digital platform. In order to sustain the design of digital services, owners of digital platforms encourage third-party developers to tap into and join the digital ecosystem. However, while there is an emerging literature on des...

Experimental studies of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning have taken two main approaches: the experimental removal of species from real communities and the construction of model communities to form gradients of diversity. The fundamental difficulty in designing biodiversity experiments is the large number of possible species combinations that make simple, unambiguo...

Photovoltaics is one of the key technologies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and achieving climate neutrality Europe by 2050, which has led to promotion solar parks. These parks can span up several hundred hectares, grassland vegetation usually created between under panels. Establishing species-rich grasslands using native seed mixtures enhance a variety ecosystem services, including poll...

Urban vegetation provides ecological services that promote both the ecosystem integrity and human well-being of urban areas, and thus is critical to urban sustainability. As a key indicator of ecological health, net primary productivity (NPP) provides valuable information about the performance of urban ecosystem in response to the changes in urban climate and atmosphere in the 21st century. In ...

The Climate Group notes that energy consumption by ICT activities represented 2 % of global human activity in 2009 [1]. ICT is therefore a sector contributing both to natural resource depletion and to greenhouse gas emission. Moreover, ICT generates considerable quantities of electronic waste, it emits radio waves (including GSM and WiFi) that can adversely affect human and animal health, and i...

We present an approach for development of Grid resource management tools, where we put into practice internationally established high-level views of future Grid architectures. The approach addresses fundamental Grid challenges and strives towards a future vision of the Grid where capabilities are made available as independent and dynamically assembled utilities, enabling run-time changes in the...

In response to the facts that some Asian developing countries were experiencing the fastest rate of industrialisation and urbanisation, several international initiatives called for a better and ‘sustainable’ urban management. Development of management tools including strategic environmental assessment (SEA), life cycle assessment (LCA), cost benefit analysis (CBA), and environmental managemen...

Designing systems in a service-oriented manner, in which application features are decoupled and run as independently executing services over a network, is becoming more commonplace and popular. Service-oriented programming provides a natural way to model and manage many types of systems and allows software development teams to achieve operational flexibility, scalability, and reliability in a c...

High individuality, large complexity and limited understanding of the mechanisms underlying human intestinal microbiome function remain the major challenges for designing beneficial modulation strategies. Exemplified by the analysis of intestinal bacteria in a thousand Western adults, we discuss key concepts of the human intestinal microbiome landscape, i.e. the compositional and functional 'co...