Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Multi-population analysis reveals spatial consistency in drivers of population dynamics of a declining migratory bird

Chloé Rebecca Nater, Malcolm D. Burgess, Peter Coffey, et al.

Published: 2022-04-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Population Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Survival Analysis, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Many migratory species are in decline across their geographical ranges. Single-population studies can provide important insights into drivers at a local scale, but effective conservation requires multi-population perspectives. This is challenging because relevant data are often hard to consolidate, and state-of-the-art analytical tools are typically tailored to specific datasets. We capitalized [...]

Interpolation of temporal biodiversity change, loss, and gain across scales: a machine learning approach

Petr Keil, Jonathan Chase

Published: 2022-03-15
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability

1. Estimates of temporal change of biodiversity, and its components loss and gain, are needed at local and geographical scales. However, we lack them because of data in-completeness, heterogeneity, and lack of temporal replication. Hence, we need a tool to integrate heterogeneous data and to account for their incompleteness. 2. We introduce spatiotemporal machine learning interpolation that can [...]

Pattern-based identification and mapping of landscape types using multi-thematic data

Jakub Nowosad, Tomasz Stepinski

Published: 2022-03-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Categorical maps of landscape types (LTs) are useful abstractions that simplify spatial and thematic complexity of natural landscapes, thus facilitating land resources management. A local landscape arises from a fusion of patterns of natural themes (such as land cover, landforms, etc.), which makes an unsupervised identification and mapping of LTs difficult. This paper introduces the integrated [...]

The costs of abating threats to Australias biodiversity

Chuanji Yong, Michelle Ward, James Watson, et al.

Published: 2022-02-04
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

1. Budgeting for biodiversity conservation requires realistic estimates of the costs of threat abatement. However, data on the costs of managing threats to biodiversity is often unavailable or unable to be extrapolated across relevant locations and scales due to a lack of transparency and consistency in how it was collated. Conservation expenditure largely occurs without a priori estimates costs [...]

Nutrient and phytoplankton dynamics of the Hunter River estuary

James Nicholas Hitchcock, Jordan Facey, Doug Westhopre, et al.

Published: 2021-12-28
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Observational studies and nutrient amendment experiments were conducted to better understand the nutrient and phytoplankton dynamics of the Hunter River estuary. Eutrophic conditions above ANZECC guidelines for estuaries dominate the Hunter River estuary. The upper Hunter estuary, upstream of its confluence with the Williams River, had the highest concentrations of nutrients and chlorophyll a. [...]

Anticipatory responses to drought by plants: What are the environmental cues?

Pedro José Aphalo, Víctor O. Sadras

Published: 2021-09-29
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Water Resource Management

This study is an attempt to reconcile the physics-driven variation in reference evapotranspiration (ET0) and possible sensory-driven anticipatory acclimation that contributes to tolerance of dry weather spells and drought by plants growing in open fields. We use an original data set measured at high temporal resolution. These data include the standard meteorological observations plus detailed [...]

Emerging opportunities for wildlife with sustainable autonomous transportation

Inês Silva, Justin M. Calabrese

Published: 2021-09-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability

Autonomous vehicles (AV) are expected to play a key role in the future of transportation, and to introduce a disruptive yet potentially beneficial change for wildlife-vehicle interactions. How-ever, this assumption has not been critically examined, and reducing the number of wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) may be beyond current technological capabilities. Here, we introduce a new conceptual [...]

Niche evolution and phylogenetic community paleoecology of Late Ordovician crinoids

Selina R. Cole, David Wright

Published: 2021-09-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Fossil crinoids are exceptionally suited to deep-time studies of community paleoecology and niche partitioning. By merging ecomorphological trait and phylogenetic data, this study summarizes niche occupation and community paleoecology of crinoids from the Bromide fauna of Oklahoma (Sandbian, Upper Ordovician). Further, patterns of community structure and niche evolution are evaluated over a ~5 [...]

Drivers of the live pet trade: the role of species traits, socioeconomic attributes and regulatory systems

Adam Toomes, Pablo García‐Díaz, Oliver C. Stringham, et al.

Published: 2021-08-27
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

The live pet trade is a major driver of both biodiversity loss and the introduction of invasive alien species. Building a comprehensive understanding of the pet trade would improve prediction of conservation and biosecurity threats, with the aim to prevent further negative impacts. We used South Australia’s native wildlife permit reporting system as a data-rich example of a live vertebrate pet [...]

Seasonally variable relationships between surface water temperature and inflow in the upper San Francisco Estuary

Samuel M Bashevkin, Brian Mahardja

Published: 2021-06-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management

Water temperature and inflow are key environmental drivers in aquatic systems that are linked through a causal web of factors including climate, weather, water management, and their downstream linkages. However, we do not yet fully understand the relationship between inflow and water temperature, especially in complex managed systems such as estuaries. The San Francisco Estuary is the center of a [...]

Comment on ‘Carbon intensity of corn ethanol in the United States: state of the science’

Seth Spawn-Lee, Tyler J. Lark, Holly Gibbs, et al.

Published: 2021-05-07
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Energy Policy, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Policy, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Life Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Soil Science, Sustainability

Scully et al [1] in their recent contribution review and revise past life cycle assessments (LCAs) of corn-grain ethanol’s carbon (C) intensity to suggest that a current ‘central best estimate’ is considerably less than all prior estimates. Their conclusion emerges from selection and recombination of sector-specific greenhouse gas emission predictions from disparate studies in a way that [...]

Warming in the upper San Francisco Estuary: Patterns of water temperature change from 5 decades of data

Samuel M Bashevkin, Brian Mahardja, Larry R. Brown

Published: 2021-04-30
Subjects: Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Temperature is a key controlling variable from subcellular to ecosystem scales. Thus, climatic warming is expected to have broad impacts, especially in economically and ecologically valuable systems such as estuaries. The heavily managed upper San Francisco Estuary supplies water to millions of people and is home to fish species of high conservation, commercial, and recreational interest. Despite [...]

Estimating complex ecological variables at high resolution in heterogeneous terrain using multivariate matching algorithms

Rachel Renne, Daniel Schlaepfer, Kyle Palmquist, et al.

Published: 2021-04-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Multivariate Analysis, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistics and Probability

1. Simulation models are valuable tools for estimating ecosystem structure and function under various climatic and environmental conditions and disturbance regimes, and are particularly relevant for investigating the potential impacts of climate change on ecosystems. However, because computational requirements can restrict the number of feasible simulations, they are often run at coarse scales or [...]

BetaBayes - A Bayesian approach for comparing ecological communities

Filipe S. Dias, Michael Betancourt, Patricia María Rodríguez-González, et al.

Published: 2021-04-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability

Ecological communities change due to both natural and human factors. Distinguishing between the two is critical to ecology and conservation science. One of the most common approaches for modelling species composition changes is calculating Beta diversity indices and then relating index changes to covariates changes. The main difficulty with these analyses is that Beta diversity indices are paired [...]

Global economic and diet transitions drove Latin American and Caribbean forest change during the first decade of the century.

David Lopez-Carr, Sadie Jane Ryan, Matthew Clark

Published: 2021-03-31
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) contain more tropical high-biodiversity forest than the remaining areas of the planet combined, yet experienced more than a third of global deforestation during the first decade of the 21st century. While drivers of forest change occur at multiple scales, we examined forest change at the municipal and national scales integrated with global processes such as [...]

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