Emerging pervasive computing services and applications have to execute in very dynamic physical and social environments. Therefore, there is need for open service frameworks promoting situated self-aware and self-adaptive behaviours in services, and supporting diversity and long-term evolvability of services. This suggests adopting a nature-inspired approach, where pervasive services are modelled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices.

We present and critically analyse a number of natural metaphors that can be adopted to realize these concepts, survey relevant proposals in the area, and introduce a reference architecture to guide in framing the challenges involved in the design and implementation of future self-adaptive pervasive service ecosystems. Application scenarios in the area of pervasive crowdsourcing will be adopted to clarify the concepts presented.