Towards Modeling and Predicting the Resilience of Ecosystems

in Sousa, Tiago (Ed.) Towards Modeling and Predicting the Resilience of Ecosystems (in press)

Since the Stockholm Declaration on the human environment in 1972, there has been a growing recognition of the impact of human activities on Earth's ecosystems. This has created an increasing need for ... [more ▼]

Since the Stockholm Declaration on the human environment in 1972, there has been a growing recognition of the impact of human activities on Earth's ecosystems. This has created an increasing need for modeling and predicting the resilience of ecosystems, which is crucial not only for understanding ecosystem patterns and processes but also for addressing climate change and implementing effective conservation and management strategies. Despite the importance of this issue, the intrinsic complexity of ecosystems and the lack of sufficient data present considerable challenges. To address these challenges, we propose an approach that combines model-driven engineering and artificial intelligence. Specifically, we propose a formalization for modeling and verifying ecosystem requirements, a method for synthesizing heterogeneous ecosystem resilience data, and a product line of neural network architectures adaptable to diverse properties and types of ecosystem scenarios to study. Additionally, we propose a model-driven process specification detailing the different artifacts, stakeholder roles, tasks, and model transformations of the proposed approach. This paper outlines the problem and preliminary work, presents the proposed approach, which is the current focus of an ongoing Ph.D. thesis, and discusses the future research contributions. [less ▲]

Formal Verification of Ecosystem Restoration Requirements using UML and Alloy

Report (2023)

United Nations have declared the current decade (2021-2030) as the ”UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration” to join R&D forces to fight against the ongoing environmental crisis. Given the ongoing degradation ... [more ▼]

United Nations have declared the current decade (2021-2030) as the ”UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration” to join R&D forces to fight against the ongoing environmental crisis. Given the ongoing degradation of earth ecosystems and the related crucial services that they offer to the human society, ecosystem restoration has become a major society-critical issue. It is required to develop rigorously software applications managing ecosystem restoration. Reliable models of ecosystems and restoration goals are necessary. This paper proposes a rigorous approach for ecosystem requirements modeling using formal methods from a model-driven software engineering point of view. The authors describe the main concepts at stake with a metamodel in UML and introduce a formalization of this metamodel in Alloy. The formal model is executed with Alloy Analyzer, and safety and liveness properties are checked against it. This approach helps ensuring that ecosystem specifications are reliable and that the specified ecosystem meets the desired restoration goals, seen in our approach as liveness and safety properties. The concepts and activities of the approach are illustrated with CRESTO, a real-world running example of a restored Costa Rican ecosystem. [less ▲]

The “Daffodil” Mission: GNSS-Reflectometry with a 1.5U CubeSat

in Proceedings of the 73rd International Astronautical Congress (2022)