We present Tiles Cards, a tool to foster end-user design thinking of smart object applications. Tiles Cards facilitate participatory design by abstracting the complexity of IoT technology into a set of interaction primitives and composition rules accessible to nonexperts. Further, it promotes creative thinking by means of a mission-based game in which teams have to fulfill design tasks under co...

Ecosystem service assessments have increasingly been used to support environmental management policies, mainly based on biophysical and economic indicators. However, few studies have coped with the social-cultural dimension of ecosystem services, despite being considered a research priority. We examined how ecosystem service bundles and trade-offs emerge from diverging social preferences toward...

Ecosystem service provisions are becoming more frequently used to assess land-use related conflicts in recent decades. This study investigates the current spatial and research information available to quantify ecosystem services relative to forest land-use planning in Ireland. A model is developed using the linear-programming method in Remsoft’s Woodstock platform. This model is applied to two ...

Forest Isbell,* David Tilman, Stephen Polasky and Michel Loreau Abstract Habitat destruction is driving biodiversity loss in remaining ecosystems, and ecosystem functioning and services often directly depend on biodiversity. Thus, biodiversity loss is likely creating an ecosystem service debt: a gradual loss of biodiversity-dependent benefits that people obtain from remaining fragments of natur...

Ecosystem services are supplied by nature but, by definition, are received by people. Ecosystem service assessments, intended to influence the decisions people make regarding their interactions with nature, need to understand how people benefit from different ecosystem services. A critical question is therefore, What determines the distribution of ecosystem service benefits between different se...

The main reason for promoting the concept of ecosystem services lies in its potential to contribute to environmental conservation. Highlighting the benefits derived from ecosystems fosters an understanding of humans' dependence on nature, as users of ecosystem services. However, the act of using ecosystem services may not be environmentally neutral. As with the use of products and services gene...

The valuation of ecosystem services is a complex process as it includes several dimensions (ecological, socio-cultural and economic) and not all of these can be quantified in monetary units. The aim of this paper is to conduct an ecosystem services valuation study for mangroves ecosystems, the results of which can be used to inform governance and management of mangroves. We used an expert-based...

In this chapter we describe our vision for the next generation of IT services. Services will be automatically discovered, procured and integrated with the service consumer‟s technical environment. This whole process will be determined by the policies defined by the consumer and will be transparent to the consumer. We also define the new applications of Policy Manager, Service Manager, Service P...

Supplement Aims and Scope Yet, in many developed and undeveloped parts of the world, consequences of these interrelated processes and the risks and hazards that they pose to both human health and ecosystems remain underexplored. This special issue of the Environmental Heath Insights will draw seek draw on new, empirical research which examines the nexus between ecosystem services and environmen...

Risk-based regulation and risk governance gain momentum in most sectorial ecosystems, should they be the finance, the healthcare or the telecommunications ecosystems. Although there is a profusion of tools to address this issue at the corporate level, worth is to note that no solution fulfils this function at the ecosystem level yet. Therefore, in this article, the Business Service Ecosystem (B...