Built environment professionals must solve urgent and complex problems related to mitigating and adapting to climate change and biodiversity loss. Cities require redesign and retrofit so they can become complex systems that create rather than diminish ecological and societal health. One way to do this is to strategically design buildings and cities to generate and provide ecosystem services. This is an aspect of biomimicry, where whole ecosystems and their functions are emulated, in order to positively shift the ecological performance of buildings and urban settings. A small number of methodologies and frameworks for ecosystem services design have been proposed, but their use is not wide spread. A key barrier is the lack of translational work between ecology concepts and practical examples of ecosystem services design for a built environment context. In response, this paper presents research underpinning the creation of a qualitative relational diagram in an online interactive format that relates ecosystem services concepts to design strategies, concepts, technologies, and case studies in a format for use by built environment professionals. The paper concludes that buildings and whole cities should be expected to become active contributors to socio-ecological systems because, as the diagram shows, many strategies and technologies to enable this already exist.

This paper uses an expert-based methodology to survey the barriers and strategies related to the implementation of nature-based solutions (NBS). The ambition of the paper is to offer a bird's eye overview of the difficulties encountered by NBS deployment and ways to overcome them. With a wide participation of 80 experts from COST Action Circular City, we identify barriers specific to 35 pre-defined NBS of the following four categories: Vertical Greening Systems and Green Roofs; Food and Biomass Production; Rainwater Management; and Remediation, Treatment, and Recovery. The research sheds light on how a major interdisciplinary - yet predominantly technically-oriented - community of scientists and practitioners views this important topic. Overall, the most relevant barriers are related to technological complexity, lack of skilled staff and training programs and the lack of awareness that NBS is an option. Our results highlight concerns related to post implementation issues, especially operation and maintenance, which subsequently affect social acceptance. The paper identifies a "chain" effect across barriers, meaning that one barrier can affect the existence or the relevance of other barriers. In terms of strategies, most of them target governance, information, and education aspects, despite the predominantly technical expertise of the participants. The study innovates with respect to state-of-the-art research by showing a fine-grained connection between barriers, strategies and individual NBS and categories, a level of detail which is not encountered in any other study to date.

Mate choice is the attempt of an individual to gain higher reproductive fitness by preferring to mate with some individuals and not with others. We studied the role of mate choice in the mating system of the neotropical toad Rhinella arenarum by assessing male reproductive tactics for mate acquisition and the contribution of female choice for pair formation. In a shallow pond in central Argentina, we estimated male mating success and the corresponding reproductive tactics by focal observation. The variation of phenotypic and genotypic traits (size and shape, longevity, vocalization features, heterozygosity) was related to the observed mating success in 110 males. The phonotactic response of 21 reproductive females to conspecific advertisement call features was tested in arena experiments. Mating success was limited to 32 males, pair formation was size-assortative. The dominant reproductive tactics were advertising from call positions near suitable breeding sites and pre-mating fights with intruding males, whereas the interception of amplectant pairs and the displacement of mated males were never observed. Female phonotaxis was directed to conspecific choruses but complex and simple call structures were not distinguished. We conclude that the mating system is a lek combining pre-mating fights among males and female choice of slightly smaller males. Fights interfere with female choice, undermining size-assortative mating. This is a unique system in the R. marina species group, in which interception behavior dominates reproduction.

Regenerative design is being increasingly explored in urban environments to counteract and adapt to the changing climate and degradation of ecosystems. A critical success factor for the implementation of regenerative design is the evaluation of urban and building systems in relation to ecological performance and benefits. In biological ecosystems, the availability of high-quality energy, called exergy, and structural order can be used as indicators of the efficiency of on-going ecological processes. Structural order refers to the organization and systematic arrangements of biotic and abiotic elements within an ecosystem based on the available space and interactions with the goal to form a functional system. Ecological processes use the available exergy and generate ecosystem services (ESs) upon which human survival and that of other living organisms depend. In this article, structural order and ESs generation are proposed as indicators for exergy efficiency and accumulation in building systems, respectively, which can evaluate to what extent they are ecologically functional and regenerative. Based on this insight, design strategies are derived from the functioning of ecosystems that describe how buildings could become habitats that host living, non-living, and hybrid systems with optimized thermodynamic efficiency and that can generate ESs. This research suggests that when buildings improve structural order (an ecological concept) and implement ESs generating processes similar to biological ecosystems, they can facilitate regenerative processes more effectively that consume and generate resources and, with this, destroy but also accumulate exergy.