Ferdinando Villa
Envisioning and building a sustainable future requires policies that harmonize very complex and little known systems that interact at many scales and in many different ways. A new science of sustainability must recognize and respect this complexity.
My research starts with the words and the grammar of interacting natural/human systems, concentrating on the ecology, the economics and the management of ecosystem services. My mission is to identify questions that are at the same time relevant and answerable. Such questions, in the hands of decision makers, will help us all plan our future.
- Position:
Ikerbasque Research Professor - Main Research Line:
Ecoinformatics - Ecosystem Services and Decision Support Systems - BC3 joining year: 2010
- Contact information:
Email adress: ferdinando.villa@bc3research.org
Contact phone: 34 94-401 46 90
Curriculum vitae
- Ferdinando Villa holds a Ph.D. in theoretical Ecology and had a long parallel career as a scientific software designer and engineer. After working in many fields of Ecology, from theoretical island biogeography to spatially-explicit decision analysis, he discovered the joys and pains of interdisciplinary research during a 14-year career in ecological economics at the universities of Maryland and Vermont. He still finds it a challenge (and a responsibility) to maintain scientific depth unaltered in face of the greatly increased breadth. He has since expanded the focus of his research to the interface of policy, ecology and economics, concentrating on artificial intelligence approaches to assist environmental decision making and natural system assessment and valuation.
- Dr. Villa best known project is ARIES (Artificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services: http://www.ariesonline.org), which is producing a next-generation web application meant to make environmental decisions easier and more effective. The ARIES project builds on a partnership of international experts, NGOs, and academics, and pairs user and expert knowledge with advanced artificial intelligence to construct a model of a case study, making sure that no relevant data or knowledge is overlooked.
- Dr. Villa's collaborations extend worldwide and include the Long Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) network and the SEAMLESS (System for Environmental and Agricultural Modelling; Linking European Science and Society) project, financed by the EU. His research on high-performance computer simulation and mathematical modeling applied to community and ecosystem ecology earned him collaborations with UNESCO, the European Union, the Italian Ministry of the Environment and several international organizations such as the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC) in Fiji. He has collaborated with international institutions and governments on environmental assessment methods, and he still manages to sneak in some research in basic ecology, protected areas planning, and related fields. He is the author or coauthor of 120+ scientific publications and a number of major open source software packages. He has been the recipient of several million USD in research grants from the US National Science Foundation, the European Union, UNEP-WCMC and other institutions and NGOs, to contribute to the science of coupled natural/human systems and develop tools for decision makers that integrate the best science with IT-assisted decision tools.
SELECTED GRANTS
A web-accessible knowledge base for the integrated analysis and
valuation of Ecosystem Services. $780,377. National
Science Foundation, 2000-2003. (Principal investigator)
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Informatics (BDEI) - Towards an Operational Semantics of Biological Diversity: Integrating Structure and Function in a Web-accessible Knowledge Base.". $95,680. National Science Foundation, 2001-2003 (Principal Investigator).
Information Technology Research (ITR): SEEK:
Enabling the Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge. National Science
Foundation. (Main program: UNM, $12,500,000 Pi: William Michener). Subcontract
to University of Vermont: $464,277, 2002-2007 (Principal Investigator of
sub-contract, co-principal investigator in main project).
System for Environmental and Agricultural
Modelling: Linking European Science and Society (SEAMLESS). European Union, €12,500,000. Subcontract to UVM: €158,000.
2005-2009 (Principal investigator of sub-contract, co-principal investigator in
main project).
Biological Databases and Informatics: Project ARIES (ARtificial Intelligence for
Ecosystem Services): an integrated Digital Collaboratory to support the economic
valuation of ecosystem services. National Science Foundation. $927,000.
Principal investigator.
United Nations
Environmental Programme (UNEP)-WCMC. 2009. Assessing flows of Ecosystem
Services from mountaintops to ocean. $80,000. Principal Investigator.
Natural Environment Research Council, UK. 2011.
Food security at the forest-agriculture interface: A complex systems analysis
of ecosystem services trade-offs and tipping points (with Southampton University). ESPA/NERC.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS (total 121)
F.Villa, O. Rossi, F. Sartore (1992): ``Understanding the role of
chronic environmental disturbance in the context of island biogeographic
theory.'' Environmental
Management, 16:
653-666.
F. Villa (1992): ``New computer architectures as tools for ecological
thought.'' Trends in
Ecology and Evolution 7: 179-183
F.Villa, M.Ceroni, A. Mazza (1996): ``A
GIS-based method for multi-objective evaluation of park vegetation.''. Landscape and Urban Planning, 35(4): 203-212.
Voinov, A.A., Costanza, R., Wainger, L.A., Boumans, R.M.J., Villa, F.,
Maxwell, T., Voinov, H. (1999): ``Integrated ecological economic modeling of
watersheds.''. Environmental
Modelling and Software, 14: 473-491.
Villa, F., Costanza, R (2000).: ``Design of multi-paradigm integrating
modeling tools for ecological research''. Environmental Modelling and Software 15: 169-177.
Villa, F.
(2001). Integrating Modelling Architecture: a declarative framework for
multi-scale, multi-paradigm ecological modelling. Ecological Modelling, 137: 23-42.
Villa, F., Tunesi, L., Agardy, T. 2002. Optimal zoning of marine protected areas through spatial multiple
criteria analysis: the case of the Asinara Island National Marine Reserve of
Italy. Conservation
Biology, 16(2): 515-526.
Costanza, R., Voinov, A., Boumans, R., Maxwell, T., Villa, F., Wainger,
L., Voinov, H. 2002. Integrated ecological economic modeling of the Patuxent
River Watershed, Maryland. Ecological Monographs, 72(2): 203-231.
Villa, F., McLeod, H. 2002. Frameworks for the calculation of synthetic
environmental vulnerability indicators for environmental planning and
decision-making. Environmental
Management, 29(3): 335-348.
Villa, F., Wilson, M.A., DeGroot, R., Farber,
S., Costanza, R., Boumans, R.M.J. 2002. Design of an integrated knowledge base
to support ecosystem services valuation. Ecological Economics 41, 445-456.
Boumans, R.M.J., Costanza, R., Villa, F. et al. 2002. Modeling the
dynamics of the integrated earth system and the value of global ecosystem
services using the GUMBO model. Ecological Economics 41, 529-560.
Villa, F. 2007. A semantic framework and
software design to enable the transparent integration, reorganization and
discovery of natural systems knowledge. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 29(1): 79-96.
Villa, F.,
Ceroni, M., Krivov, S. 2007. Intelligent
databases enable transparent and sound economic valuation of ecosystem
services. Environmental
Management 39: 878-899.
Madin, J., Bowers, S.,
Schildhauer, M., Krivov, S., Ludaescher, B., Pennington, D., Villa, F. 2007.An
ontology for Describing and Synthesizing Ecological Observation Data. Ecological Informatics 2: 279-296.
Rizzoli,
A.E., Donatelli, M., Athanasiadis, I.N, Villa, F., Huber, D. 2008. Semantic links in integrated modelling
frameworks. Mathematics and Computers in
Simulation 78: 412-423.
Pennington, D., Villa, F.,
Athanasiadis, I., Madin, J., Schildhauer, M., Bowers, S., Krivov, S. 2008.
Indirectly-Driven Knowledge Modeling in Ecology. International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies. 3: 210-225.
Villa, F., Athanasiadis, I.N. Rizzoli, A.E. 2009. Modelling with
knowledge: a review of emerging semantic approaches to environmental modelling.
Environmental Modelling and Software 24:
577-587.
Villa, F., Semantically-driven meta-modelling:
automating model construction in an environmental decision support system for
the assessment of ecosystem services flow. 2009. In: Information Technology in Environmental Engineering, I.N.
Athanasiadis, et al., Editors. 2009, Springer: New York, NY. p. 23-36.
Johnson, G.W., Bagstad, K., Snapp, R., Villa,
F. 2010. Service Path Attribution Networks (SPANs): Spatially Quantifying the
Flow of Ecosystem Services from Landscapes to People. Lecture Notes in Computer
Science 6016: 238-253.
Villa, F. 2010. Bridging scales and paradigms
in Natural Systems Modelling. Metadata and Semantic Research. Communications in
Computer and Information Science 108: 1-7.
Johnson, G.W., Bagstad, K., Snapp, R., Villa,
F. 2011. Service Path Attribution Networks (SPANs): A Network Flow approach to
Ecosystem Service Assessment. To appear in International Journal of
Agricultural and Environmental Information Systems.
Villa, F., Bagstad, K., Johnson, G.W., Voigt,
B. 2011. Scientific instruments for
climate change adaptation: estimating and optimizing the efficiency of
ecosystem services provision. Economia Ambiental y Recursos Naturales.
Forthcoming.
