Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Nature and Society Relations
Generating a national snapshot of all publicly-reported investments in ecosystem and species conservation across public, private, and philanthropic finance
Published: 2026-02-10
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations
Scaling up investment in ecosystems is a national and international public policy priority, but evaluations of the total amount spent have been severely criticised for a lack of methodological rigour. Increasingly governments are looking to the private sector to fill the nature finance ‘funding gap’, but a lack of transparent reporting of especially private finance flows is a known limitation. In [...]
Supporting wildlife movement amid the rise of border infrastructure
Published: 2026-01-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Law, Environmental Studies, Forest Management, Nature and Society Relations, Zoology
Transboundary areas of conservation importance affected by border infrastructure and militarization urgently need connectivity conservation solutions. Where human conflicts are ongoing and peace initiatives may be unviable, smaller-scale approaches can still be implemented. We propose a multi-faceted approach to support animal movement and minimize impacts of multiple border barriers on medium to [...]
Bridging Science and Policy: A Global Review of Socio-ecological Indicators Guiding Biodiversity Action
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Biology, Community-based Research, Environmental Monitoring, Human Ecology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Nature and Society Relations, Other Political Science, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
1. Biodiversity continues to decline despite a proliferation of indicators intended to inform conservation policy. We asked which socio-ecological indicators are actually reaching decision-makers, how they are used, and where critical gaps persist. 2. Following a scoping-review protocol and PRISMA workflow, we screened 906 documents in Web of Science and Scopus and analyzed 43 studies that [...]
Mapping Cultural Ecosystem Service Flows from Social Media Imagery with Vision–Language Models: A Zero-Shot CLIP Framework
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Computational Engineering, Computer Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability
Geotagged social media imagery provides a valuable source for mapping cultural ecosystem service (CES) flows, which represent realized human interactions with nature, yet its open-world user-generated content poses challenges to automated content analysis. Supervised models require large labeled datasets and show limited generalization across contexts, whereas unsupervised approaches often need [...]
SEICAT+: a comprehensive assessment framework for positive socio-economic impacts of alien species
Published: 2025-10-20
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Economics, Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Demography, Population, and Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Despite their recognized harms to humans and biodiversity, alien species outside of domestication/cultivation can also provide socio-economic benefits, which are essential to consider when identifying stakeholder conflicts and informing managers and policymakers. These benefits often result from the enhancement of ecosystem services, such as the provision of food, timber, and other natural [...]
Catalysing community-led local nature recovery with opportunity mapping: lessons from the Oxfordshire Treescape Project
Published: 2025-07-11
Subjects: Nature and Society Relations, Spatial Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Background. The UK has ambitious nature recovery targets. Local communities and land managers have knowledge, expertise, and capacity to support place-based nature recovery, making them well-placed to help deliver these goals. We explore how these groups can be supported in nature recovery plans that combine their local knowledge with complex ecological data, using Oxfordshire Treescape [...]
Overcoming “doom and gloom”: Envisioning desirable futures for Arctic biodiversity
Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
We co-created visions of desirable futures for Arctic biodiversity during a workshop which included representatives from academia, Indigenous Peoples, business and policy-making. Appreciating our diverse perspectives, we identified key actions that would enable the positive outcomes shared in our visions: boosting education, rethinking Arctic biodiversity governance, elevating the voices of [...]
Asian Hornbill Bibliography: a dynamic, online, open-access reference database for use in manuscript citations and hornbill research
Published: 2024-06-18
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Library and Information Science, Nature and Society Relations, Ornithology, Plant Sciences, Publishing, Scholarly Publishing
Bibliographic databases and citation tools are integral aids to research. The Asian Hornbill Bibliography presents a compendium of research on Asian hornbills by combining an open access bibliographic database with the free and open source reference manager, Zotero. The bibliography, also hosted and made accessible from the IUCN Hornbill Specialist Group website, includes 725 publications, [...]
Clarifying ethical stances in conservation: a trolley problem thought experiment
Published: 2024-05-24
Subjects: Nature and Society Relations
Conservation policies often need to integrate scientific predictions with ethical considerations. However, different normative ethical systems at the root of conservation approaches often support different decisions, and the moral stances of stakeholders are influenced by diverse societal values and perceptions. This creates the potential for dilemmas and conflicts. Here we adapt the well-known [...]
Light Pollution at Sea: Implications and Potential Hazards of Human Activity for Offshore Bird and Bat Movements in the Greater North Sea
Published: 2024-05-24
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management, Zoology
Human activity in the North Sea is intensifying, as emerging uses, such as offshore wind farms (OWFs) and liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals, are added to fishing, freight shipping and fossil fuel production as traditional forms of resource exploitation. The volume and scale of these additional installations are projected to increase substantially in the coming decades, which amplifies the need [...]
Measuring historical pollution: natural history collections as tools for public health and environmental justice research
Published: 2023-07-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Health Policy, Inequality and Stratification, Nature and Society Relations, Public Policy, Urban Studies and Planning
Background: Through the industrial era, environmental pollution has been unevenly distributed in the environment, disproportionately impacting disenfranchised communities. The distribution of pollution is thus a question of environmental justice and public health that requires policy solutions. However, we lack robust quantitative data on pollutants for many locations and time periods because [...]
Landscape changes in the “valli da pesca” of the Venice lagoon and possible effects on the Ecosystem Services supply
Published: 2023-06-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Nature and Society Relations, Other Environmental Sciences, Remote Sensing, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Coastal lagoons have long been subject to continuous changes caused by mutual interactions with human activities. Monitoring such changes becomes critical, particularly when modifications in landscape and land cover classes can affect their capacity to ensure Ecosystem Services (ESs). In the Venice lagoon, some confined areas called “valli da pesca” supply provisioning ESs, namely aquaculture and [...]
A Perspective on Conservation and Development
Published: 2023-05-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Demography, Population, and Ecology, Environmental Studies, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography
Since the industrial revolution, the predominant model of economic development has involved economies of scale and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, leading to environmental degradation and the ongoing mass extinction of species. The environmental impacts of this development-for(the sake of)-development model led to biodiversity conservation efforts that can be described as [...]
Yield declines and producer responses to shifting climate and economic conditions in Mexican coffee production
Published: 2023-04-06
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Economics, Agriculture, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Other Environmental Sciences
Coffee’s climate sensitivity contributes to extreme production and price fluctuations. However, as coffee is a perennial crop, producers have difficulty responding to short-term market shifts. Combining historical climate, production and price data from all coffee-growing municipalities in Mexico, we examined trends of climate and coffee production and then characterized and quantified coffee [...]
The March of the Human Footprint
Published: 2022-09-29
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Human influence is driving planetary change, often in undesirable and unsustainable ways. Recent advances enabled us to measure changes in humanity’s footprint on Earth annually from 2000 – 2019 with a nine-fold improvement in spatial resolution over previous efforts. We found that earlier studies seriously under-estimated the magnitude, extent, and rate of change in the human footprint. [...]