Search results for "Visioning"

2021

Sustainable forest management plays a key role for forest biodiversity and the provisioning of ecosystem services (BES), including the important service of carbon sequestration for climate change mitigation. Forest managers, however, find themselves in the increasingly complex planning situation to balance the often conflicting demands in BES. To cope with this situation, a prototype of a decision support system (DSS) for strategic (long-term) planning at the forest enterprise level was developed in the present project. The DSS was applied at three case study enterprises (CSEs) in Northern Switzerland, two lowland and one higher-elevation enterprise, for a 50-year time horizon (2010 to 2060…

Impacts and adaptation options of climate change on ecosystem services in Finland: a model based study

2013

At a global level, it is estimated that nearly two-thirds of ecosystem services have been degraded in just fifty years. The additional stresses imposed by climate change will require extraordinary adaptation. This paper synthesises main result of a large Finnish project studying the vulnerability of key ecosystem services to climate change and the possibilities for the individual sectors to adapt to these changes. The project based its work on data and infrastructures of nine intensively studied areas belonging to the Finnish LTER (Long-Term Ecological Research) network. The methods developed and used included remote sensing, derivation of impact scenarios, dynamic modelling, laboratory exp…

Approximate Algorithm for Fast Capacity Provisioning in WANs with Trade-Off between Performance and Cost under Budget Constraint

2014

Due to the emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN) with the idea of centralized control over computer networks, the Capacity and Flow Assignment Problem (CFA) may be approached in a classical non-distributed fashion in real-life scenarios. The question arises whether a heuristical approach to this NP-complete problem is of any use in practice.

Towards Next Generation System Architecture for Emergency Services

2011

European Union has decided that all emergencies can be reported to authorities by European citizens by calling 112 or sending a text message to 112. Distributing warnings and alerts of authorities to citizens currently happens through national TV and radio channels, but telecom networks are also used now in some countries for this purpose. During the last ten years there have been attempts to develop new system architectures for various emergency service provision phases. Some of them are already deployed in special cases, like in ambulance services. Multimedia emergency alert messages can be delivered to citizens over fixed and mobile telecom networks and commercial systems are already in …

UbiRoad: Semantic Middleware for Context-Aware Smart Road Environments

2010

A smart road environment is such a traffic environment that is equipped with all necessary facilities to enable seamless mobile service provisioning to the users. However, advanced sensors and network architectures deployed within the traffic environment are insufficient to make mobile service provisioning autonomous and proactive, thus minimizing drivers’ distraction during their presence in the environment. For that, an Intelligent Transportation System, which is operating on top of numerous sensor and access networks and governing the process of mobile services provisioning to the users in self-managed and proactive way, must be deployed. Specifically, such system should provide solution…

Assessment of ecosystem integrity and service gradients across Europe using the LTER Europe network

2015

Better integration of knowledge from ecological, social and economic science is necessary to advance the understanding and modelling of socio-ecological systems. To model ecosystem integrity (EI) and ecosystem services (ES) at the landscape scale, assessment matrices are commonly used. These matrices assign capacities to provide different services to different land cover types. We revised such an existing matrix and examined the regional heterogeneity in EI and ES provision in Europe and searched for spatial gradients in their provision to elucidate their suitability for large-scale EI and ES mapping in Europe. Overall, 28 sites belonging to the Long-Term Ecological Research network in Euro…

A dynamic life-cycle model for the provisioning of software testing services

2014

Information and communications technology (ICT)-enabled international sourcing of software-intensive systems and services (eSourcing) is a powerful strategy for managing businesses more effectively. China is becoming a superpower for eSourcing service provisioning, but most Chinese providers are small- or medium-sized and leverage the mediated eSourcing model, delivering services to foreign ICT clients who interface with end-clients onshore. This model restricts the providers to low-value projects. This paper probes eSourcing of software testing services within the Chinese market because testing is one of the best ICT services small- and medium-sized providers can provide to develop domain …

Per-flow signalling extension across DiffServ domains

2003

This paper describes a framework devised to extend per-flow admission control operation across Differentiated Services domains. Although the specific case of interoperability with RSVP is under discussion, our proposal can be easily adapted to other hop-by-hop signalling protocols. In our framework, DiffSery border routers accomplish three tasks. First, during the set-up phase, flows are mapped onto PHB groups on the basis of their QoS and traffic specifications. Second, signalling packets are tunnelled into IP packets marked as “probes”, where the “probe” marking is a DCSP value associated to the considered PHB Group. Third, when the flow set-up is complete, flow data packets are marked as…

ASSESSMENT OF ECOSYSTEM SERVICES FOR PLANNING OF GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE AT THE REGIONAL LEVEL

2019

Ecosystem services (ES) are defined as the benefits that human beings derive from ecosystem functions. Assessment and mapping of these benefits are crucial for sustainable environmental planning and future natural capital. Green infrastructure (GI) is natural or semi-natural territories that provide wide range of ES. Human affected ecosystems tend to fail to provide certain sets of ES due to the trade-offs among those services, which could be mitigated through implementation of GI. Mapping of ES, as well as assessing the interactions among various ES and analysing their supply potential’s cold/hot spots considerably enhances and substantiates the planning process of GI, particularly at the …

Dynamics of the caring family

2003

When several individuals simultaneously provide for offspring, as in families, the effort of any one individual will depend on the efforts of the other family members. This conflict of interest among family members is made more complicated by their relatedness because relatives share genetic interest to some degree. The conflict resolution will also be influenced by the differences in reproductive value between breeders and helpers. Here, we calculate evolutionarily stable provisioning efforts in families with up to two helpers. We explicitly consider that the behavioral choices are made in a life-history context, and we also consider how group sizes change dynamically; this affects, for ex…