Anthropocentrism in Western (modern industrial) society is dominant, goes back hundreds of years, and can rightly be called ‘hubris’. It removes almost all moral standing from the nonhuman world, seeing it purely as a resource. Here, we discuss troubling components anthropocentrism: worldview ethics; dualisms, valuation values; psychology fear denial; idea philosophical ‘ownership’. We also que...

Human activities in outer space are producing increasing quantities of space “debris”. This well-known fact posits the question about the value and use of space technologies after their operation period has expired. Rather than calling these non-functional objects “debris”, we propose to treat them as “end-of-life allopoietic systems” with the potential of becoming autopoietic systems. In gener...

For over a century, viruses have been known as the most abundant and diverse group of organisms on Earth, forming a virosphere. Based on extensive meta-analyses, we present, for the first time, a wide and complete overview of virus-host network, covering all known viral species. Our data indicate that most of known viral species, regardless of their genomic category, have an intriguingly narrow...

Work on multiscale issues presents countless challenges that have been long attacked by GIScience researchers. Research is usually concentrated in one of two directions new data models to support handling multiple scales, or data structures and algorithms to process data across scales. Complementary implementation aspects are concerned with generalization (and/or virtualization of distinct scal...