The ARIES project seeks to quantify ecosystem services – the benefits nature provides to society – using highly flexible and customizable data and models, served on the semantic web. Like all applications of the k.LAB/k.IM modeling approach, we integrate multiple modeling paradigms (e.g., process models, agent-based models, Bayesian networks, lookup tables) to quantify the supply, use, and flow of ecosystem services, and improve the reusability of data related to ecosystem services.
ARIES has been used around the world – for example, to assess food and water security in Africa, cultural ecosystem services in the Himalayas, ridge-to-reef ecosystem services in Hawaii, and national environmental-economic accounts in the United States and Europe.