Technological and Social Innovations in Urban Ecosystems: Perspectives on Green and Blue Infrastructure

Dear Colleagues,

Urbanization is an inevitable fate for mankind. According to the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat), the urban population increased five-fold between 1950 and 2011 worldwide. The year 2007 was a turning point, when more than half of world’s population became urban for the first the time. Mathematical projections suggest that more people will have left rural areas by 2030, especially in Africa and Asia, where the least urbanized countries are currently found. As result, the complexity of the urban environment has escalated worldwide.

To face the environmental, economic, and social challenges of urbanization, cities have promoted the implementation of green and blue infrastructure (GBI) that brings multiple benefits to urban citizens through a supply of ecosystem services, i.e., flood control, the mitigation of heat island effects, the mitigation of atmospheric pollution, and the maintenance of biodiversity.

Technological innovations based on GBI can contribute to strengthening the ecosystems inherent to cities, thus improving environmental quality. In this way, technology applied to the urban environment can be a vector of socio-environmental transformation, working towards the democratization of more environmentally equitable territories.

Therefore, the aim of this Special Issue is to collate original contributions (original research articles and review articles) on technological and social innovations in urban ecosystems, especially from the perspective of green and blue infrastructure.

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that focus on various themes, such as the following:

• Technologies applied in urban ecosystems;
• innovative methodologies for evaluating ecological patterns;
• social innovations involving urban forests;
• ecological processes in urban ecosystems;
• urban biodiversity assessment;
• socio-environmental aspects in urban ecosystems.

This SI is in cooperation with a conference (4th Latin American Forum on Urban Forests: Social and Technological Innovation in Urban Forestry) and welcomes submissions from participants of the conference.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Dr. Maurício Lamano Ferreira
Dr. Aline A. Cavalari Corete
Dr. Giuliano Maselli Locosselli
Guest Editors

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• urban forest
• urban greening
• green infrastructure
• blue infrastructure
• socio-environmental issues
• nature-based solutions
• ecological patterns and processes in urban environments