The objective of SAPERE is the development of a highly-innovative theoretical and practical framework for the decentralized deployment and execution of self-aware and adaptive services for future and emerging pervasive network scenarios. The framework will be grounded on a foundational re-thinking of current service models and of associated infrastructures and algorithms. In particular, getting inspiration from natural ecosystems, the project will demonstrate and experiment the possibility of modelling and deploying services as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices, and of enforcing self-awareness and autonomic behaviours as inherent properties of the ecosystem, rather than as peculiar characteristics of its individuals only.The specific objectives that will be pursued in a tightly orchestrated way by the proposal, each contributing to the overall definition of the integrated SAPERE framework, include:•\tDefining an innovative model for service and data components in the ecosystem, based on a simple concept of self-aware components and a general nature-inspired interaction model;•\tStudying and experimenting decentralized self-* algorithms to enforce various forms of spatial self-organization, self-composition, and self-management for data and services in the ecosystem;•\tStudying and experimenting solutions to support advanced management of data and situation identification, to inject advanced forms of present- and future-awareness in the ecosystem;•\tImplementing an innovative, lightweight and modular infrastructure for the deployment and execution of services, and for the management of contextual data items.The effectiveness of the proposed solutions and of the overall SAPERE framework will be experienced and evaluated in selected use cases in the area of "adaptive and decentralized pervasive services".