Publications related to Exploitation of natural resources

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Raphael Cherfan

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where collaboration and division of labor enhance survival of the whole colony, and are thus considered “superorganisms”. Historically, studying behaviors involving ...

2024

Steel Pipes and Global Networks: The Influence of Dalmine S.p.A in Shaping Resource Extraction Infrastructures

Anna Karla De Almeida Milani

Pipelines for extracting oil, gas, water, and supporting energy systems are part of the infrastructure of extractive sites, especially marked in countries with less urbanized areas. Throughout the twentieth century, such regions were influenced by economic ...

2023

Resistances to change in urban travel behaviors

Marc-Edouard Baptiste Grégoire Schultheiss

The social discourse surrounding the climate emergency progressively infuses the society, transforming into both micro- and macro-social injunctions to change. Yet, society - grounded in a territorial, social, and cultural contingency - appears to resist t ...

EPFL2023

The applications of Internet of Things in the automotive industry: A review of the batteries, fuel cells, and engines

Jan Van Herle, Hossein Pourrahmani

The current advances in the integration of devices through the internet of things (IoT) have encouraged researchers to focus on the applications of IoT in the automotive industry. Although different achievements in the in-vehicle network analysis and traff ...

ELSEVIER2022

Towards circular phosphorus: The need of inter- and transdisciplinary research to close the broken cycle

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Kai Udert

Phosphorus (P) is an essential element to all living beings but also a finite resource. P-related problems center around broken P cycles from local to global scales. This paper presents outcomes from the 9th International Phosphorus Workshop (IPW9) held 20 ...

2022

Conditions for the emergence of circumnutations in plant roots

Dario Floreano, Ilya Loshchilov

The plant root system shows remarkably complex behaviors driven by environmental cues and internal dynamics, whose interplay remains largely unknown. A notable example is circumnutation growth movements, which are growth oscillations from side to side of t ...

2021

Seeking methods for improving sustainability in the extractive sector

Farnaz Eslamishoar

Extractive resources are indisputably a necessary component of international sustainable development. Despite current advancements in the circular economy, world production needs for raw materials are ever increasing, and still a long way remains for it to ...

EPFL2021

Conduit, Patio, Waste: Mapping Environmental Relations in Bairro da Malagueira

Bárbara Maçães E Costa

The ongoing ecological crisis is reframing the common binary opposition between architecture and nature and provoking us to ask what kinds of buildings we collectively want to create for the ecosystems that we inhabit. The environment is not a neutral back ...

EPFL2021

Upcycling Space Structures (Preface to special issue)

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Olivier Baverel

The construction industry’s contribution to the deterioration of Earth’s ecosystem is huge. 11% of all anthropic greenhouse gas emissions worldwide are due to the construction, demolition, and transformation of buildings and infrastructure. Construction an ...

2021

Overview: Integrative and Comprehensive Understanding on Polar Environments (iCUPE) – concept and initial results

Julia Schmale, Imad El Haddad, Jakob Boyd Pernov, Jenny Thomas

The role of polar regions is increasing in terms of megatrends such as globalization, new transport routes, demography, and the use of natural resources with consequent effects on regional and transported pollutant concentrations. We set up the ERA-PLANET ...

Copernicus Publications2020

Benefits of a Diversified Energy Mix for Islanded Systems

Christophe Ballif, Nicolas Würsch, Laure-Emmanuelle Perret Aebi, Lionel Benjamin Bloch, Christian Rod, Marine Dominique Cauz

Achieving energy self-sufficiency is a major challenge for remote areas, especially islands. Various technologies have recently been developed to exploit renewable resources in such areas in order to reduce dependency on fossil fuels. This work focuses on ...

2020

On the probabilistic nature of the species-area relation

Andrea Rinaldo, Andrea Giometto, Jonathan Giezendanner, Silvia Zaoli, Amos Maritan

The Species-Area Relation (SAR), which describes the increase in the number of species S with increasing area A, is under intense scrutiny in contemporary ecology, in particular to probe its reliability in predicting the number of species going extinct as ...

2019

Efficient Workload Colocation in Modern Data Centers

Calin Iorgulescu

Despite the high costs of acquisition and maintenance of modern data centers, machine resource utilization is often low. Servers running online interactive services are over-provisioned to support peak load (which only occurs for a fraction of the time), d ...

EPFL2019

Nuove ecologie alpine: industrializzazione e costruzione della città-territorio

Roberto Sega

This research study offers a reflection on the Alpine urban condition through the observation of the spaces of production. Departing from the premise that the tourist economy cannot be the only possible horizon for Alpine development, this thesis reflects ...

EPFL2018

Articulating natural resources and sustainable development goals through green economy indicators: A systematic analysis

Albert Merino, Marta Giulia Baldi, Bruno Maria Camelo Oberle, Ian Gunderson

Natural Resources are essential inputs for economic and social development. However, unsustainable resource use has led to environmental degradation and resource depletion, endangering the well-being of humanity and the environment. The 2030 Agenda for Sus ...

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV2018

Covariations in ecological scaling laws fostered by community dynamics

Andrea Rinaldo, Andrea Giometto, Silvia Zaoli, Amos Maritan

Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and theoreticians. Empirical evi ...

2017

Rethinking Urban Form: Switzerland as a "Horizontal Metropolis"

Paola Viganò, Elena Cogato Lanza, Martina Barcelloni Corte, Chiara Cavalieri, Christian Arnsperger

In light of the rapid population growth forecast for the coming years and the powerful transformations already occurring throughout its whole territory, today's Switzerland stands in urgent need of critical reflection on its urban future. A novel set of co ...

Cogitatio Press2017

Towards a sustainable development licence to operate for the extractive sector

Bruno Maria Camelo Oberle

The extractive sector now holds an even more predominant position for national economies following the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. The sector can make significant contributions to the achievement of a large number of these Goals. ...

Springer Heidelberg2017

Multiple resources and their sustainable development in Urban Underground Space

Aurèle Parriaux, Huanqing Li, Chao Liu

Traffic congestion and ground space scarcity are increasing the need to find more space in the urban underground. The demand-driven "top-down" planning of Urban Underground Space (UUS) is common worldwide. As natural resource, the endowments of UUS are dif ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2016

Méthodologie multicritère d'aide à la décision pour le renouvellement urbain à l'échelle du quartier

Maria Gracia Riera Perez

The present work develops a new methodology for assessing urban renewal scenarios at the neighborhood scale. Entitled URBIUS, this methodology seeks to meet the needs of municipalities in terms of planning for the development of their urban built fabric. I ...

EPFL2016