The European Union has launched a research initiative into "Universal Information Ecosystems" (see http://www.cordis.lu/ist/fethome.htm). This is a broad but potentially interesting area of work, highly relevant to SSP group interests. I shall talk about the initiative and discuss the pre-proposal which currently exists, linking different strands of research from within Edinburgh and externally. Of particular interest is how far the analogy drawn by the initiative, between computation and ecology, can be used to anchor experiments.