The challenges in ecosystem science encompass a broadening and strengthening of interdisciplinary ties, the transfer of knowledge of the ecosystem across scales, and the inclusion of anthropogenic impacts and human behavior into ecosystem, landscape, and regional models. The volume addresses these points within the context of studies in major ecosystem types viewed as the building blocks of central European landscapes. The research is evaluated to increase the understanding of the processes in order to unite ecosystem science with resource management. The comparison embraces coastal lowland forests, associated wetlands and lakes, agricultural land use, and montane and alpine forests. Techniques for upscaling focus on process modelling at stand and landscape scales and the use of remote sensing for landscape-level model parameterization and testing. The case studies demonstrate ways for ecosystem scientists, managers, and social scientists to cooperate.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2004, held in Birmingham, UK, in September 2004. The 119 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 358 submissions. The papers address all current issues in biologically inspired computing; they are organized in topical sections on theoretical and foundational issues, new algorithms, applications, multi-objective optimization, co-evolution, robotics and multi-agent systems, and learning classifier systems and data mining.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN V, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in September 1998. The 101 papers included in their revised form were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 185 submissions. The book is divided into topical sections on convergence theory; fitness landscape and problem difficulty; noisy and non-stationary objective functions; multi-criteria and constrained optimization; representative issues; selection, operators, and evolution schemes; coevolution and learning; cellular automata, fuzzy systems, and neural networks; ant colonies, immune systems, and other paradigms; TSP, graphs, and satisfiability; scheduling, partitioning, and packing; design and telecommunications; and model estimations and layout problems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2006. The book presents 106 revised full papers covering a wide range of topics, from evolutionary computation to swarm intelligence and bio-inspired computing to real-world applications. These are organized in topical sections on theory, new algorithms, applications, multi-objective optimization, evolutionary learning, as well as representations, operators, and empirical evaluation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature,PPSN 2002, held in Granada, Spain in September 2002. The 90 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 181 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on evolutionary algorithms theory, representation and codification, variation operators, evolutionary techniques and coevolution, multiobjective optimization, new techniques for evolutionary algorithms, hybrid algorithms, learning classifier systems, implementation of evolutionary algorithms, applications, and cellular automata and ant colony optimization.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation held jointly with the 4th Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN IV, in Berlin, Germany, in September 1996. The 103 revised papers presented in the volume were carefully selected from more than 160 submissions. The papers are organized in sections on basic concepts of evolutionary computation (EC), theoretical foundations of EC, modifications and extensions of evolutionary algorithms, comparison of methods, other metaphors, and applications of EC in a variety of areas like ML, NNs, engineering, CS, OR, and biology. The book has a comprehensive subject index.

We are proud to introduce the proceedings of the Seventh International C- ference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN VII, held in Granada, Spain, on 7–11 September 2002. PPSN VII was organized back-to-back with the Foundations of Genetic Algorithms (FOGA) conference, which took place in Torremolinos, Malaga, Spain, in the preceding week. ThePPSNseriesofconferencesstartedinDortmund,Germany[1].Fromthat pioneering meeting, the event has been held biennially, in Brussels, Belgium [2], Jerusalem, Israel [3], Berlin, Germany [4], Amsterdam, The Netherlands [5], and Paris, France [6]. During the Paris conference, several bids to host PPSN 2002 were put forward; it was decided that the conference would be held in Granada with Juan J. Merelo Guerv ́ os as General Chairman. The scienti?c content of the PPSN conference focuses on problem-solving paradigms gleaned from natural models, with an obvious emphasis on those that display an innate parallelism, such as evolutionary algorithms and ant-colony optimization algorithms. The majority of the papers, however, concentrate on evolutionary and hybrid algorithms, as is shown in the contents of this book and itspredecessors.Thiseditionoftheconferenceproceedingshasalargesectionon applications,betheytoclassicalproblemsortoreal-worldengineeringproblems, which shows how bioinspired algorithms are extending their use in the realms of business and enterprise.

We are very pleased to present to you this LNCS volume, the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN 2010). PPSN is one of the most respected and highly regarded c- ference series in evolutionary computation, and indeed in natural computation aswell.Thisbiennialeventwas?rstheldinDortmundin1990, andtheninBr- sels (1992), Jerusalem (1994), Berlin (1996), Amsterdam (1998), Paris (2000), Granada (2002), Birmingham (2004), Reykjavik (2006) and again in Dortmund in 2008. PPSN 2010 received 232 submissions. After an extensive peer review p- cess involving more than 180 reviewers, the program committee chairs went through all the review reports and ranked the papers according to the revi- ers’comments. Each paper wasevaluated by at least three reviewers.Additional reviewers from the appropriate branches of science were invoked to review into disciplinary papers. The top 128 papers were ?nally selected for inclusion in the proceedings and presentation at the conference. This represents an acceptance rate of 55%, which guarantees that PPSN will continue to be one of the c- ferences of choice for bio-inspired computing and metaheuristics researchers all over the world who value the quality over the size of a conference. The papers included in the proceedingsvolumes covera wide range of topics, fromevolutionarycomputationto swarmintelligence, frombio-inspiredcomp- ing to real-world applications. Machine learning and mathematical games s- portedbyevolutionaryalgorithmsaswellasmemetic, agent-orientedsystemsare also represented. They all are the latest and best in natural computation. The proceedings are composed of two volumes divided into nine thematic sections.

This two-volume set LNCS 13398 and LNCS 13399 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2022, held in Dortmund, Germany, in September 2022. The 87 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The conference presents a study of computing methods derived from natural models. Amorphous Computing, Artificial Life, Artificial Ant Systems, Artificial Immune Systems, Artificial Neural Networks, Cellular Automata, Evolutionary Computation, Swarm Computing, Self-Organizing Systems, Chemical Computation, Molecular Computation, Quantum Computation, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence approaches using Natural Computing methods are just some of the topics covered in this field.