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Urban environments provide opportunities for greater resource efficiency and the fostering of urban ecosystems. Brownfield areas are a typical example of underused land resources. Brownfield redevelopment projects that include green infrastructure allow for further ecosystems to be accommodated in urban environments. Green infrastructure also deliver important urban ecosystem services (UES) to local residents, which can greatly contribute to improving quality of life in cities. In this case study, we quantify and assess the economic value of five UES for a brownfield redevelopment project in Antwerp, Belgium. The assessment is carried out using the “Nature Value Explorer” modelling tool. The case includes three types of green infrastructure (green corridor,infiltration gullies and green roofs) primarily intended to connect nature reserves on the urban periphery and to avoid surface runoff. The green infrastructure also provides air filtration, climate regulation, carbon sequestration and recreation ecosystem services. The value of recreation far exceeds other values, including the value of avoided runoff. The case study raises crucial questions as to whether existing UES valuation approaches adequately account for the range of UES provided and whether such approaches can be improved to achieve more accurate and reliable value estimates in future analyses.

This chapter investigates how the institutional context influences the business models for community energy projects, which often intend to enable community members to gain some level of influence, control and ownership over the energy system. We analyse the viability of these projects, by investigating the concrete opportunities for community-based Virtual Power Plant projects in two countries (the Netherlands and Ireland) and how these are shaped by incumbent institutional arrangements at EU, national and local levels. The analysis is structured using the constitutive elements of a business model can-vas as a heuristic. The results show that in order to survive in the energy services market (which is necessary for economic viability on the longer term) community energy initia-tives are forced to partially abandon their community logic-based business model. We discuss how current institutional arrangements are not conducive to a more inclusive en-ergy system and how this could be improved.

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The Republic of Serbia has a significant potential for the electricity production from solar energy, namely the floating photovoltaic (PV) systems, which are not exploited enough. Although there is a large interest in floating photovoltaic systems (FPVS) worldwide, studies related to the assessment of FPVS potential in this part of Europe have not been performed yet. This paper investigates, for the first time, the possibility of implementation of the FPVS on the six largest Serbian lakes and demonstrates the impact of geographical location on the energy output of the FPVS for the selected locations. The possibility of implementation is studied by simulating the energy output of FPVS using "PVGIS" tool. Energy production from the proposed FPVS, for selected locations, is discussed on a monthly and yearly basis. Installment of the FPVS on these water bodies can produce up to 8959 kWh of energy, while saves 164⋅10^6 m3/year of water from evaporation at the same time. In addition, the annual reduction of carbon dioxide emissions was analyzed and found to be up to 6.34 tons per year, which further implies with carbon credit potential of up to 9741 € in 20 years period. Drawn conclusions provides better understanding of FPVS and their applicability in the Republic of Serbia to ensure a sustainable, ecological friendly, secure and reliable supply of green energy, and further the used approach can be easily applied in other countries with similar geographical characteristics.

The extensive abandonment of agricultural lands in the Mediterranean basin has led to large landscapes being dominated by early-successional species, characterized by high flammability and an increasing fire risk. This fact promotes fire occurrence and places ecosystems in a state of arrested succession. In this work, we assessed the effectiveness of several restoration actions in redirecting these ecosystems toward more resilient communities dominated by resprouting species. These actions included the mechanical clearing of early-successional species, the plantation of resprouting species, and the combination of both treatments. For 13 years, we assessed shifts in the successional trajectory and ecosystem flammability by changes in: species composition, species richness, ecosystem evenness, the natural colonization of resprouting species, total biomass and proportion of dead biomass. We observed that the plantation and clearing combination was a suitable strategy to promote resilience. Species richness increased as well as the presence of the resprouting species introduced by planting. The natural colonization of the resprouting species was also enhanced. These changes in the successional trajectory were accompanied by a possible reduction of fire risk by reducing dead fuel proportion. These findings are relevant for the management of Mediterranean basin areas, but also suggest new tools for redirecting systems in fire-prone areas worldwide.

The energy transition in agriculture must be accompanied by agronomic practices that shift production towards organic regimes. Among the energy consuming processes that today find resistance in organic conversion there is certainly the removal of weeds from crops, that is mainly carried out through herbicides. This analysis evaluates the economic and environmental implications that the introduction of innovative thermal weeding systems, powered by biomass gasification, can have in the substitution of traditional chemical and mechanical weeding technologies. The comparison is carried out through a combination of cost–benefit analysis, environmental analysis and sensitivity analysis applied to the case study of vineyard management in northern Italy. The results show that the biomass-powered weeding system is economically feasible when it can benefit from economic incentives that reward organic production. In all cases, biomass-powered weeding system provides for a reduction in equivalent CO2 emissions which reaches −75% in the case of replacement of glyphosate-based chemical weeding methods. The analysis points out that gasification-powered weeding process can also achieve carbon neutrality through the co-production of biochar, which should lead policy makers to support this practice under the environmental objectives at national and European level.

Up to nowadays, satellite data have become increasingly available, thus offering a low cost or even free of charge unique tool, with a great potential for quantitative assessment of urban expansion and urban sprawl, as well as for monitoring of land use changes and soil consumption. This growing observational capacity has also highlighted the need for research efforts aimed at exploring the potential offered by data processing methods and algorithms, in order to exploit as much as possible this invaluable space-based data source. The work herein presented concerns an application study on the process of urban sprawl conducted with the use of satellite ASTER data. The selected test site is highly significant, being it a coastal zone (with the presence of sand and rocks) characterized by a fragmented ecosystem and small towns, with an increasing rate of urbanization and soil consumption. In order to produce synthetic maps of urban areas, ASTER images were classified using two automatic classifiers, Maximum Likelihood (MLC) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) applied by changing setting parameters, with the aim to compare their respective performances in terms of robustness, speed and accuracy. All process steps have been developed integrating Geographical Information System and Remote Sensing, and adopting free and open source software. Results pointed out that the SVM classifier with RBF kernel was generally the best choice (with accuracy higher than 90%) among all the configurations compared, and the use of multiple bands globally improves classification. One of the critical elements found in this case study is given by the presence of sand and sand mixed with rocks. The use of different configurations for the SVMs, i.e. different kernels and values of the setting parameters, allowed us to calibrate the classifier also to cope with a specific need, as in our case, to achieve a reliable discrimination of sand from urban area. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Starting from (but not limited to) their importance in the Italian context, three agricultural substrates, two of fruit origin (grape seeds and plum stones) and one of herbaceous origin (woad), were comparatively tested for both biomethane production and digestate characterization. The anaerobic digestion tests showed that grape seeds had the highest net methane production of 253.0 NmL g volatile solids (VS)(-1), followed by plum stones, whose best resulting net methane production was 174.7 NmL gVS(-1), and finally by woad with a net methane production of 153.1 NmL gVS(-1). Interestingly, the best methane productions of the fruit substrates were obtained with different substrate to inoculum ratios (on a VS basis), 1:1 for grape seeds but 2:1 for plum stones. On the other hand, a three-month ageing of woad caused a limited reduction of methane production. The estimation of obtained degrees of conversion, carried out on a chemical oxygen demand (COD) basis for the specific tests achieving the respective best methane productions, gave values of 48%, 31%, and 33% for grape seeds, plum stones, and woad, respectively. The estimated degrees of conversion were evaluated along with the respective methane productions and substrate COD/VS ratios. The comparison of Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectra and differential thermal analysis (DTA) profiles, carried out for selected digestates in pairs, revealed some distinctive differences in the relative intensities or presence and absence of particular peaks in the FT-IR spectra and in the relative intensities of the exothermic peaks or horizontal curve shifting of the DTA profiles.