Search results for " Ecological Networks"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Machine learning of microbial interactions using abductive ILP and hypothesis frequency/compression estimation
2021
Interaction between species in microbial communities plays an important role in the functioning of all ecosystems, from cropland soils to human gut microbiota. Many statistical approaches have been proposed to infer these interactions from microbial abundance information. However, these statistical approaches have no general mechanisms for incorporating existing ecological knowledge in the inference process. We propose an Abductive/Inductive Logic Programming (A/ILP) framework to infer microbial interactions from microbial abundance data, by including logical descriptions of different types of interaction as background knowledge in the learning. This framework also includes a new mechanism …
Urban Services to Ecosystems - Green Infrastructure Benefits from the Landscape to the Urban Scale
2021
The aim of this book is to bring together multidisciplinary research in the field of green infrastructure design, construction and ecology. The main core of the volume is constituted by contributions dealing with green infrastructure, vegetation science, nature-based solutions and sustainable urban development. The green infrastructure and its ecosystem services, indeed, are gaining space in both political agendas and academic research. However, the attention is focused on the services that nature is giving for free to and for human health and survival. What if we start to see things from another perspective? Our actions shall converge for instance to turn man-made environment like cities f…
Plant-animal seed dispersal interactions as key drivers of ecological restoration in a changing world
2022
Many global and European commitments state the need to plant billions of trees and restore millions of hectares of degraded ecosystems to contrast biodiversity loss, desertification and climate change. Seed dispersal is a crucial process promoting vegetation dynamics, and in the Mediterranean, up to 65% of woody plant species need animals for seed dispersal. Therefore, such mutualistic ecological interaction represents a key nature-based solution to help us reaching our commitments. In this presentation first we will report the strong expansion rate and correlated finescale spatio-temporal patterns of woody natural regeneration over a pastureland, using a spatially-explicit framework deploy…
Urban Services to Ecosystems: An Introduction
2021
Green infrastructure is a structural system of naturally developed human societies, capable of preserving and ensuring as much space as possible to the local biodiversity. For this reason, green infrastructure shall be planned and designed so that the urban built environment is in harmony with the surrounding biotic communities. The challenge is to sustain nature-based solutions in order to improve citizens’ awareness towards natural and semi-natural ecosystems while providing our society with a more liveable, healthier, safer and fairer environment. This book puts an emphasis on the services the city can offer to nature, thanks to a multidisciplinary approach involving scientists and pract…