We introduce the concept of City Service Ecosystem (CSE) as digital environment for the governance of urban services. We trace the research challenges and opportunities of adding semantics to improve the management of such ecosystems, especially in relation to description and retrieval of urban-related Web services. We explain the peculiarities and distinct characteristics of CSEs resulting fro...

Over 70% of the population in developed countries live in cities. World wide, the average urban population proportion is 42% (World population reference, 1993). Urbanization creates significant changes in land use and land cover, affecting the structure, pattern and function of the ecosystem. The public is increasingly concerned about how these changes influence our daily life and the sustainab...

Land-use and land-cover change affect the biogeochemistry of stream ecosystems in numerous ways, both direct and indirect. Changes result from hydrologic modifications, including direct alterations of flow regimes and hydrologic flowpaths and indirect changes in hydrologic patterns via increased impervious cover in contributing areas of watersheds. Direct changes to channel morphology (i.e., re...

Introduction: Framing the Analysis This chapter is concerned with the long-term sustainability of cities. My starting premise is that because of accelerating global ecological change, cities everywhere are facing unprecedented challenges to their functional integrity and even survival. Unprecedented challenges require unprecedented solutions. In keeping with this reality, I depart from most urb...

Urbanization is found to be closely associated with land use/land cover change which has an important influence in our environment and ecosystems, such as urban heat island effect, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and pollutions. Studies on accurately simulating urban expansion have been inspired by increasing concerns of the sustainability of urban development. This paper reports our research ...

BACKGROUND The main task is to estimate the qualitative and quantitative contribution of urban territories and precisely of the process of urbanization to the Global Carbon Cycle (GCC). Note that, on the contrary to many investigations that have considered direct anthropogenic emission of CO2 (urbanized territories produce ca. 96-98% of it), we are interested in more subtle, and up until the pr...

1. By the end of this decade, the majority of people will live in cities and suburban areas. Urban areas, including suburbs and exurbs, are expanding rapidly worldwide. 2. Plant ecology has largely ignored cities, or has primarily focused on the discrete urban green spaces within cities. 3. Plant ecology is increasingly engaging urban ecosystems as integrated natural-human systems, in which hum...