Geosciences Digital Ecosystems

In a digital society, the interconnection between the physical and the digital world has become almost complete. To monitor, understand, and simulate our planet behavior, public and private stakeholders can now interact in the “cyber-physical” world, in a more effective and intense way. This represents an Geosciences Digital Ecosystems, Fig. 1 The dynamic nature of geospatial digital ecosystems (Nativi et al. 2021) 4 Geosciences Digital Ecosystems important paradigm shift (in respect to the traditional data exchange approach), which requires a cultural, organizational, economic, and legal evolution. On the other hand, the increasing exchange of information, occurring in the cyber-physical domain among a dynamic set of autonomous systems, escalates the interaction complexity and introduces the need to preserve the effectiveness of the overall system for the benefit of all the stakeholders. Natural ecosystems with their capability to solve complex and dynamic problems through evolution and self-organization provide an interesting paradigm to address the complexity in an ever-changing cyber-physical environment. Geoscience digital ecosystems leverage such organizational model to assure the generation and sharing of environmental knowledge for the benefit of Society through collaboration and competition of autonomous systems. As in the case of natural ecosystems, geoscience digital ones are subject to internal and external disruptive changes that threaten its effectiveness in providing the ecosystem services required by Society. For this reason, geospatial digital ecosystems need a governance assuring curation and protection. Such a governance should include a metasystem level implementing the cybernetic functionalities of communication and control that assure the desired invariance of an ecosystem that lives in a highly dynamic environment. Then, the ecosystem is free to evolve, while keeping constant its values, principle, and traits for the benefit of the community. Today, geospatial digital ecosystems provide those scalable analytical and interpretation services that are required to develop advanced simulation and projection models, notably the Digital Twins of the Earth (Nativi and Craglia 2021).