Innovation for Resilience Biodiversity to Global Warming

Dear Colleagues,

Biodiversity has significant cultural scientific, and economic value. Human welfare is connected to biodiversity and its capacity to sustain natural capital—the flow of beneficial goods and services provided by the ecosystem. Natural capital includes both wild ecosystems, which are not dominated by humans, and agroecosystems and aquatic ecosystems, which are strongly influenced by humans. This results in a socio-ecological landscape with cultural value characterized by coevolution between social and economic humans capital and abiotic and biotic natural capital.  

The biodiversity and natural capital resilience of the socio-ecological landscape can be strongly influenced by factors that act at a global scale, such as global warming, which alters the plant physiological and biochemical processes that sustain ecosystem services provisioning, increasing weed pests and uncontrolled spread of invasive species. These are only some examples of the negative impact of climate change that could lead to biodiversity loss, with a decline and deterioration of ecosystems, species, and genetic resources important for the tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses.

In this context, human efforts have to be devoted to increasing the adaptive capacity of the socio-ecological landscape intended as the human ability to adjust to changing internal demands generated by climate change preserving the main biodiversity and social-ecological processes that support natural capital flow. At the local scale, the socio-ecological landscape resilience to climate change can be influenced by the human capital involved in mitigating the negative impact of global processes, such as drought, flood events, etc., and these amplify the investment in new research, technologies, and human behavior to provide policy, program, and project innovations. Therefore, new solutions are needed for natural resource use able to keep the same human benefits and biodiversity preservation but in a different way with respect to actual systems.

This Special Issue is being released in affiliation with the 14th National Conference on Biodiversity - 1st International Conference on Mediterranean Biodiversity to be held 13–15 September 2023 (https://leccebiodiversity2023.com). It will collect papers (original research articles and review papers) to give insights about studies and applications on the cause–effect response of climate change impacts on biodiversity at different levels of the organization, from ecosystem to genetic levels and in different environment matrices, from terrestrial to aquatic, that can be a good starting point for new adaptive strategies and inspiration for international policies, programs, and projects. We stimulate the submission of publications on applications that can represent an evolution of the capacity of “human Drivers” to reduce the pressure on the biodiversity state in agreement with the new concept of natural resources use that also involves planning of green and blue infrastructure.

This Special Issue will not only comprise selected papers from the conference, but will also gather papers by interested experts worldwide. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

State-of-the-art mitigation strategies to tackle the effects of climate change on biodiversity and natural capital.

1. New technologies for natural capital increase at different biodiversity levels;
2. Methodology and tools of analysis of the impacts of climate change on biodiversity at different levels of biodiversity organizations and in different environment matrix;
3. A new design framework for agro-ecological system, aquatic ecosystem and presenting critical reviewer of case study on green and blue infrastructure that can be good solution in social ecological landscape, including rural and urban area;
4. Evaluation method of the benefits of agro-ecological systems and the aquatic ecosystem in supporting biodiversity and natural capital;
5. Interaction between biodiversity, well-being and health;
6. Promotion of new program, policy and project at different scale able to sustain biodiversity conservation and natural capital provisioning;
7. Promotion of cultural value conservation or valorization in the context of climate change and socio-economic evolution;
8. promotion of human adaptation behavior including diversification of food diets;
9. Applications of agro-ecological system to increase natural capital in rural and urban areas.

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

Dr. Riccardo Buccolieri
Dr. Teodoro Semeraro
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• biodiversity
• natural capital
• ecosystem services
• resilience
• adaptive capacity
• global warming
• agroecosystem
• agro-ecological system
• aquatic ecosystem
• green infrastructure
• blue infrastructure
• sustainability
• human well-being