Network Science for All in Sustainability
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2022) | Viewed by 895
Special Issue Editor
Interests: complex systems; complex networks; network science; data mining
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Sustainability, i.e., our need to coexist with the Earth’s biosphere and to preserve it indefinitely in the future, is inherently a complex problem, that is, a problem that can be described within the framework of complexity science and that can benefit from a complex network representation.
Complex networks theory, a statistical physics interpretation of the older graph theory from mathematics, proposes modeling systems as networks, i.e., objects composed of nodes (the elements of the system) and links (connections between them). This allows creating an abstract representation that disregards irrelevant details and focuses on the patterns created by the interactions between the composing elements. Since its introduction, network science has been applied to many and diverse scientific problems, from neuroscience to transportation systems.
Most problems in sustainability do not depend on individual elements: what is important are the interactions between them. To illustrate, species interact between them in an ecosystem through complex patters, creating what is known as “the food web”; the international trade of resources and pollution, and its impact on the environment, has a clear network structure; and networks are also the pillar of transportation systems, and for the evaluation of their impact on the environment.
In this Special Issue, we seek high quality contributions in the wide topic of network science for sustainability. This includes topics such as, but not limited to, novel network representations of ecological systems; network representations of human activities, e.g., supply chains and transportation systems, and their impact on the environment; models of the interactions between different networks, representing the biosphere at different scales; and models for controlling the evolution of these networks.
Dr. Massimiliano Zanin
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- network science
- sustainability
- biosphere
- ecological systems
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