Biomimetics, Vol. 10, Pages 578: A Call for Bio-Inspired Technologies: Promises and Challenges for Ecosystem Service Replacement

Biomimetics doi: 10.3390/biomimetics10090578

Authors:
Kristina Wanieck
M. Alex Smith
Elizabeth Porter
Jindong Zhang
Dave Dowhaniuk
Andria Jones
Dan Gillis
Mark Lipton
Marsha Hinds Myrie
Dawn Bazely
Marjan Eggermont
Mindi Summers
Christina Smylitopoulos
Claudia I. Rivera Cárdenas
Emily Wolf
Peggy Karpouzou
Nikoleta Zampaki
Heather Clitheroe
Adam Davies
Anibal H. Castillo
Michael Helms
Karina Benessaiah
Shoshanah Jacobs

Ecosystem services are crucial for animals, plants, the planet, and human well-being. Decreasing biodiversity and environmental destruction of ecosystems will have severe consequences. Designing technologies that could support, enhance, or even replace ecosystem services is a complex task that the Manufactured Ecosystems Project team considers to be only achievable with transdisciplinarity, as it unlocks new directions for designing research and development systems. One of these directions in the project is bio-inspiration, learning from natural systems as the foundation for manufacturing ecosystem services. Using soil formation as a case study, text-mining of existing scientific literature reveals a critical gap: fewer than 1% of studies in biomimetics address soil formation technological replacement, despite the rapid global decline in natural soil formation processes. The team sketches scenarios of ecosystem collapse, identifying how bio-inspired solutions for equitable and sustainable innovation can contribute to climate adaptation. The short communication opens the discussion for collaboration and aims to initiate future research.

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Kristina Wanieck www.mdpi.com