Lures and artefacts, which are almost as old as hunting and fishing, are used to elicit a particular behaviour in animals through key signals. The advances in robotics and sensors/actuators technologies opened the way to go from passive decoys to decoys able to fully interact with animals. Of special interest in this context are social species that are characterized by large networks of feedbacks of similar types but that involve various physicochemical vectors. The monitoring, the control and the breeding/farming of such populations often involve changes to the environment including artefacts that can be seen as environmental decoys. In this paper, we take the paradigmatic case of the formation of aggregates in a patchy environment : gregarious individuals having the choice to settle under an arbitrary number of shelters that are artificial agents able to communicate between themselves and to interact with the sheltered individuals through the modification of their abiotic factors such as temperature, light or odour. These systems can be modelled by the same generic models that serve as prediction and management tools. The model analysis allows to identify the behaviour of the artificial agents/shelters optimizing the population management.

In the wake of climate change and water quality crisis, it is crucial to find novel ways to extensively monitor the environment and to detect ecological changes early. Biomonitoring has been found to be an effective way of observing the aggregate effect of environmental fluctuations. In this paper, we outline the development of biohybrids which will autonomously observe simple organisms (microorganisms, algae, mussels etc.) and draw conclusions about the state of the water body. These biohybrids will be used for continuous environmental monitoring and to detect sudden (anthropologically or ecologically catastrophic) events at an early stage. Our biohybrids are being developed within the framework of project Robocoenosis, where the operational area planned are Austrian lakes. Additionally, we discuss the possible use of various species found in these waters and strategies for biomonitoring. We present early prototypes of devices that are being developed for monitoring of organisms.

In a time marked by ecological decay and by the perspective of a severe backlash of this ecosystem decay and climate devastation onto human society, bold moves that employ novel technology to counteract this decline are required. We present a novel concept of employing Artificial Life technology, in the form of cybernetically enhanced bio-hybrid superorganisms as a countermeasure and as a contingency plan. We describe our general conceptual paradigm, consisting of three interacting action plans, namely: (1) Organismic Augmentation; (2) Bio- Hybrid Socialization and (3) Ecosystem Hacking, which together compose a method to create a novel agent for ecosystem stabilization. We demonstrate, through early results from the research project HIVEOPOLIS, a specific way how classic Artificial Life technologies can create such a living, ecologically active and technologically-augmented superorganism that operates outside in the field. These technologies range from cellular automata and biomimetic robots to novel and sustainable biocompatible materials. Aiming at having a real-world impact on the society that relies on our biosphere is an important aspect in Artificial Life research and is fundamental to our methodology to create a physically embodied and useful form of Artificial Life.