Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences

Is the audience gender-blind? Smaller audience in female talks highlights prestige differences in academia

Júlia Rodrigues Barreto, Isabella Romitelli, Pamela Cristina Santana, et al.

Published: 2024-05-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Evolution, Gender Equity in Education, Higher Education, Inequality and Stratification, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Psychological Phenomena and Processes

Although diverse perspectives are fundamental for fostering and advancing science, power relations have limited the development, propagation of ideas, and recognition of minority groups in academia. Gender bias is one of the most well-documented processes, leading women to drop out of their academic careers due to fewer opportunities and lower prestige. Using long-term data (2008-2019) on talks [...]

Blood lead increases and haemoglobin decreases in urban birds along a soil contamination gradient in a mining city

Max M Gillings, Riccardo Ton, Tiarne Harris, et al.

Published: 2024-03-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

  Lead contaminated soil is a persistent global threat to the health of animal populations. Nevertheless, links between soil lead and its adverse effects on exposed wildlife remain poorly understood. Here, we explore local geographic patterns of exposure in urban birds along a gradient of lead contamination in Broken Hill, an Australian mining city. Soil lead concentrations are linked to [...]

Japanese mayfly family classification with a vision transformer model

Yuichi Iwasaki, Hiroko Arai, Akihiro Tamada, et al.

Published: 2024-02-10
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Benthic macroinvertebrates are a frequently used indicator group for biomonitoring and biological assessment of river ecosystems. However, their taxonomic identification is laborious and requires special expertise. In this study, we aimed to assess the capability of a vision transformer (ViT) model for family-level identification of mayflies (order Ephemeroptera). Specifically, we focused on [...]

A big data and machine learning approach for monitoring the condition of ecosystems

Miguel Equihua, Octavio Pérez-Maqueo, Julián Equihua, et al.

Published: 2024-01-16
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Ecosystems are highly valuable as a source of goods and services and as a heritage for future generations. Knowing their condition is extremely important for all management and conservation activities and public policies. Until now, the evaluation of ecosystem condition has been unsatisfactory and thus lacks practical implementation for most countries. We propose that ecosystem integrity is a [...]

The role of deadwood in the carbon cycle: Implications for models, forest management, and future climates

Baptiste Joseph Wijas, Steven D Allison, Amy T Austin, et al.

Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Deadwood represents a significant carbon pool in forests and savannas. Although previous research has focused mainly on forests, we synthesise deadwood studies across all ecosystems with woody vegetation. Storage and release of carbon from deadwood is controlled by interacting decomposition drivers including biotic consumers (animals, microbes) and abiotic factors (water, fire, sunlight, [...]

House Sparrows as Sentinels of Childhood Lead Exposure

Max M Gillings, Riccardo Ton, Tiarne Harris, et al.

Published: 2024-01-04
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Our understanding of connections between human and animal health has advanced substantially since the canary was introduced as a sentinel of toxic conditions in coal mines. Nonetheless, the development of wildlife sentinels for monitoring human exposure to toxins has been limited. Here, we capitalized on a three-decade long child blood lead monitoring program to demonstrate that the globally [...]

Quantifying clearance rates of restored shellfish reefs using modular baskets

Maja Paulina Andersson, Karen L Cheney, Robbie Porter, et al.

Published: 2023-12-08
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management, Zoology

Shellfish reefs are among the most degraded ecosystems globally, prompting substantial efforts to restore them. While biodiversity gains of restored reefs are well documented, other ecosystem services such as water filtration remain poorly quantified. We present a novel way of measuring water filtration by restored reefs using modular restoration structures called Robust Oyster Baskets (ROB 400). [...]

A Perspective on How Glyphosate and 2,4-D May Impact Climate Change

Christine M Cornish, Jon Sweetman

Published: 2023-08-26
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

An increase in herbicide use is occurring due to a growing population and herbicide-resistant crops in agriculture, which has resulted in more herbicide tolerant target species. Glyphosate and 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) are two of the most commonly used herbicides worldwide and are more recently being used in combination in pre-mixed commercial formulas. Subsequently, herbicide [...]

Assessing risk of ecosystem collapse in a changing climate

Jessica A. Rowland, Emily Nicholson, Jose-Rafael Ferrer-Paris, et al.

Published: 2023-08-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences

Climate change has pervasive impacts on Earth’s ecosystems, but the diversity and complexity of ecosystems makes estimating the severity of impacts and the resulting risk of collapse difficult. In this perspective, we conceptualise the challenge of understanding how climate change alters ecosystems, and how to reliably measure those changes in ecosystem risk assessments, focussing on the IUCN Red [...]

Landscape changes in the “valli da pesca” of the Venice lagoon and possible effects on the Ecosystem Services supply

Alice Stocco, Lorenzo Duprè, Fabio Pranovi

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 [...]

Biogeochemistry of soils, sediments, and surface waters across the upland to wetland gradient of coastal interfaces

Allison Myers-Pigg, Stephanie C. Pennington, Khadijah K Homolka, et al.

Published: 2023-05-15
Subjects: Environmental Sciences

Transferable and mechanistic understanding of cross-scale interactions is necessary to predict how coastal systems respond to global change. Cohesive datasets across geographically distributed sites can enable a mechanistic understanding of coastal ecosystem control points and examine how geographically transferable this knowledge is. To address the above research objectives, data were collected [...]

Yield declines and producer responses to shifting climate and economic conditions in Mexican coffee production

Katherine Ennis, Paulo Quadri, Kai Zhu, et al.

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 intersection between elected representatives and threatened species recovery

Gareth Sean Kindler, Stephen Kearney, Alex Kusmanoff, et al.

Published: 2022-11-05
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Geography, Political Science

A core objective of the conservation movement is to motivate government decision-makers into delivering critical policy changes to abate the global species extinction crisis. Using Australia as a case study, we showcase a way of highlighting the intersection between a nation’s elected representatives and extant threatened species. We analyse the relationship between Australia’s 151 Commonwealth [...]

The March of the Human Footprint

Eric Wayne Sanderson, Kim Fisher, Nathaniel Robinson, et al.

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. [...]

Publication bias impacts on effect size, statistical power, and magnitude (Type M) and sign (Type S) errors in ecology and evolutionary biology

Yefeng Yang, Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar, Rose E O'Dea, et al.

Published: 2022-09-12
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability

Collaborative assessments of direct replicability of empirical studies in the medical and social sciences have exposed alarmingly low rates of replicability, a phenomenon dubbed the ‘replication crisis’. Poor replicability has spurred cultural changes targeted at improving reliability in these disciplines. Given the absence of equivalent replication projects in ecology and evolutionary biology, [...]

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