The International Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) network comprises > 600 scientific groups conducting sitebased research within 40 countries. Its mission includes improving the understanding of global ecosystems and informs solutions to current and future environmental problems at the global scales. The ILTER network covers a wide range of social-ecological conditions and is aligned with...

Background: The livelihood of an open source ecosystem is important to different ecosystem participants: software developers, end-users, investors, and participants want to know whether their ecosystem is healthy and performing well. Currently, there exists no working operationalization available that can be used to determine the health of open source ecosystems. Health is typically looked at f...

Eddy covariance measurements were carried out at the Wetzstein site in Thuringia, Germany since December 2001. Soon after the start of the measurements night-time fluxes well above average CO2-fluxes measured in temperate forest ecosystems were detected which could not be explained by biological processes but were valid with respect to standard quality criteria. The Wetzstein site is part of th...

The grasslands of Inner Mongolia are not only the source of the necessary resources for the survival and development of herdsmen, but also represent a significant green ecological barrier in North C hina. Coal-mining production is important in maintaining GDP growth in Inner Mongolia. However, overexploitation has created serious problems, such as pollution of the environment and significant de...

Brazilian biodiversity is recognized as one of the most expressive in the terrestrial biosphere and plays an important role to human well-being and health, providing basic products and ecosystem services. The products or goods from natural ecosystems include pharmaceutical material, food such as fishery, timber, and many others. Natural ecosystems also provide essential life-supporting services...

Biodiversity and many ecosystem services provide a key instrumental and constitutive factor determining human wellbeing [1]. Pollination is among a valuable ecosystem services which provides a variety of benefits including food and fiber, plantderived medicines, ornamentals, aesthetics, genetic diversity, and overall ecosystem resilience [1,2]. About 2/3rd of the crop plants that feed the world...

The nexus approach helps in recognizing the link between water, energy, and food production systems, emphasizing the need to manage them in a more integrated way. The socio-ecosystem (SES) approach, however, goes beyond that, by incorporating the regulation and supporting services in the management equation. Changes in ecosystem integrity affect the delivery of ecosystem services to society, wh...

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) introduced a new framework for analyzing social-ecological systems that has had wide influence in the policy and scientific communities. Studies after the MA are taking up new challenges in the basic science needed to assess, project, and manage flows of ecosystem services and effects on human well-being. Yet, our ability to draw general conclusions rema...

Associate models are powerful tools for large software ecosystem orchestrators to manage clusters within its ecosystem. At present, however, it remains unclear how these associate models are used in practice and of what elements such models consist. Without an overview of what associate models consist of, the concept of software ecosystem orchestration will remain elusive. In this paper, a conc...

The fitness of a species determines its abundance and survival in an ecosystem. At the same time, species take up resources for growth, so their abundance affects the availability of resources in an ecosystem. We show here that such species-resource coupling can be used to assign a quantitative metric for fitness to each species. This fitness metric also allows for the modeling of drift in spec...