A Call for Bio-Inspired Technologies: Promises and Challenges for Ecosystem Service Replacement

Ecosystem services are crucial for animals, plants, the planet, and human well-being. Decreasing biodiversity and environmental destruction of ecosystems will have severe consequences. Designing technologies that could support, enhance, or even replace ecosystem services is a complex task that the Manufactured Ecosystems Project team considers to be only achievable with transdisciplinarity, as it unlocks new directions for designing research and development systems. One of these directions in the project is bio-inspiration, learning from natural systems as the foundation for manufacturing ecosystem services. Using soil formation as a case study, text-mining of existing scientific literature reveals a critical gap: fewer than 1% of studies in biomimetics address soil formation technological replacement, despite the rapid global decline in natural soil formation processes. The team sketches scenarios of ecosystem collapse, identifying how bio-inspired solutions for equitable and sustainable innovation can contribute to climate adaptation. The short communication opens the discussion for collaboration and aims to initiate future research.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Biomimetics

• Publication date

  2025-09-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Engineering, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3390/biomimetics10090578PMID 41002812PMCID 12467230
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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