Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Changepoint detection methods as a practical tool for assessment of ecological restoration
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Statistics and Probability
1. A key aim of many conservation initiatives is to induce a change, however detecting change from monitoring data can be challenging. Here, we introduce statistical methods for changepoint detection, demonstrating how this under-utilised analytical approach can provide practitioners and researchers insight and help in planning ecological restoration projects. 2. We show why it is important to [...]
Reframing Mangroves as Socio-Ecological Coastal Infrastructure: Development and Application of a Six-Pillar Socio-Ecological Infrastructure Framework
Published: 2026-10-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mangrove ecosystems are critical components of coastal socio-ecological systems, providing shoreline protection, biodiversity support, carbon sequestration, and livelihood opportunities for coastal communities. However, increasing pressures from climate change, coastal development, and environmental degradation threaten their resilience and long-term sustainability. This study proposes a [...]
Does roadless rule? Social-ecological consequences of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Roadless Rule, established 25 years ago to maintain 58.5 million federal forest acres in roadless condition, is one of the U.S.’s most expansive and debated natural resource experiments. We synthesize research on the effects of the Roadless Rule on biodiversity, wildfire, forest and watershed health, and economics to guide current and future decision making. Research shows the Roadless Rule [...]
wildtag.ai: an open-access end-to-end offline AI-assisted desktop application for managing camera trap projects
Published: 2026-09-01
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Bioinformatics, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Camera traps generate massive volumes of data, yet their decision-support potential is diluted by the bottleneck of manual processing. Automated classification has largely solved this, but classification alone does not remove the barriers to adoption: it must be coupled with the means to turn predictions into a verified, shareable dataset, which no existing tool does end-to-end, offline, and [...]
Uptake of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in plants: A systematic review and meta-analysis research protocol
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) transfer from contaminated environments into plants, contributing to food chain accumulation and an exposure pathway central to human health risk assessment. Regulatory risk assessments commonly use plant bioconcentration factors (BCFs) to estimate dietary exposure and support the derivation of health-based guideline values, yet they have not been [...]
Measure what the coarsening removes: a precondition for interpreting spatial-resolution comparisons in ecological models
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Ecological models increasingly use "scale-free" downscaled climate surfaces, assuming finer resolution predicts local response better. Even a comparison that varies resolution alone can fail to test it: over a small extent, coarsening barely changes the predictors. I provide a diagnostic detecting this before a model is fitted. Though the variance decomposition is classical, calibrating it [...]
Soil microbial communities and reciprocal distributions of nitrogen-cycling proxies beneath legume and non-legume patches in a disturbed orchard
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
The belowground interactions between plants and soil microbial communities play an important role in the recovery of historically disturbed land. However, these relationships remain poorly understood at fine spatial scales. In this exploratory study, we characterized bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic soil communities beneath five plant types (red clover, white clover, fescue, chicory, and [...]
Meeting Mediterranean conservation targets through systematic conservation planning
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
The ocean is increasingly being used by new human activities, fueled by an expansion of the “blue-economy” adding new pressures to the marine environment. These changes are happening fast, and balancing biodiversity conservation and present and future uses of the marine space needs to be done in an equitable way for human and ecological communities. Here, we used a systematic conservation [...]
From Scalable Biodiversity Measurement to Credible Biodiversity Metrics
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Business, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Economics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistical Models, Sustainability, Technology and Innovation
Governments struggle to develop effective policies to counter the decline of species and ecosystems. An obstacle to command-and-control and incentive-based mechanisms is that biodiversity is costly to measure, creating an information asymmetry in which firms and governments are incentivised to withhold information on adverse impacts. Using a principal-agent model, we show that credible reporting [...]
A mathematical foundation of modelling thermal injury and repair dynamics in ectotherms
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Evolution, Life Sciences, Physiology, Plant Sciences, Population Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Survival Analysis
As global temperatures rise and extreme heat events impair ectotherm performance and survival, it is becoming increasingly important to predict how organisms accumulate and repair thermal injury under realistic benign and stressful temperatures. The thermal death time (TDT) model quantifies how heat events translate into thermal injury, but under natural temperature fluctuations the TDT model is [...]
Overview of evidence on agroforestry's role in biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation and adaptation in low- and middle-income countries
Published: 2026-06-16
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
Agroforestry has been promoted as one solution to make agriculture more ecologically sustainable. While research has examined its effects on biodiversity and on climate change mitigation and adaptation separately, comprehensive reviews linking these outcomes remain lacking. This review fills that gap. We searched six academic databases in June 2025, retrieving 12,175 unique records. Screening [...]
A data-driven assessment of the global community structure of pelagic zooplankton biomass
Published: 2026-06-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Statistical Models
Aim: Zooplankton often dominate pelagic metazoan biomass, making them a central component of marine ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles. In this study, we aimed to: (1) provide biomass distributions of zooplankton functional types to support marine ecosystem monitoring and biogeochemical model evaluation; and (2) investigate regional and seasonal patterns of biomass across marine zooplankton [...]
Predicting substrate size at a watershed scale to inform conservation planning for a declining salmonid species
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Biology, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Good quality spawning habitat is critical for fish embryo development, survival, and overall population productivity. Appropriate riverbed substrate size is particularly important for riverine-spawning salmonids but the availability of suitable substrate may vary across a watershed. Predicting substrate size at watershed extents may therefore be critical to inform management and conservation of [...]
Towards Nature Positive supply chains: From biodiversity commitments to organisational action
Published: 2026-05-21
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Large organisations are critical to halting and reversing biodiversity loss, and increasingly making bold commitments for nature. However, translating commitments into action requires robust strategies to fully identify, quantify, trace, and act. This is particularly pertinent because most organisational impacts are hidden within complex supply chains. Here we present a novel, generalised, and [...]
Policy Pathways for Enabling Mussel Shell Reuse in Marine Restoration in Chile
Published: 2026-04-02
Subjects: Environmental Law, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences
Chile is the world’s second-largest producer of mussels and the leading exporter, harvesting approximately 400,000 t/year, of which about 30% becomes shell waste. While this biomaterial poses a growing disposal challenge, it also represents an opportunity for marine ecological restoration. In southern Chile, where mussel farming is concentrated, efforts to reuse shells as nature-based solutions [...]