Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Assessing risk of ecosystem collapse in a changing climate
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
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
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
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
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
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
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, [...]
Scientific maps should reach everyone: a straightforward approach to let colour blind people visualise spatial patterns
Published: 2022-09-09
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Maps represent powerful tools to show the spatial variation of a variable in a straightforward manner. A crucial aspect in map rendering for its interpretation by users is the gamut of colours used for displaying data. One part of this problem is linked to the proportion of the human population that is colour blind and, therefore, highly sensitive to colour palette selection. The aim of this [...]
Research protocol: The effectiveness of feed efficiency and husbandry in mitigating the enteric methane emissions of dairy and beef cattle in temperate farming systems; a rapid synthesis and network meta-analysis
Published: 2022-07-11
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Beef and dairy cattle of temperate farming systems will be studied to investigate the relationships between their methane emissions as well as their efficiencies as milk and beef producers. The investigation will comprehensively utilise all research published on this topic to date via a formalised rapid review and analysing it together through a network meta-analysis. The use of organic versus [...]
Uneven biodiversity sampling across redlined urban areas in the United States
Published: 2022-06-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Demography, Population, and Ecology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Inequality and Stratification, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology, Urban Studies and Planning
Citizen science data has rapidly gained influence in urban ecology and conservation planning, but with limited understanding of how such data reflects social, economic, and political conditions and legacies. Understanding patterns of sampling bias across socioeconomic gradients is critical to accurately map and understand biodiversity patterns, and to generating representative and just [...]
GridDER: Grid Detection and Evaluation in R
Published: 2022-05-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Observations and collections of organisms form the basis of our understanding of Earth’s biodiversity and are an indispensable resource for global change studies. Geographic information is key, serving as the link between organisms and the environments they reside in. However, the geographic information associated with these records is often inaccurate, thus limiting their efficacy for research. [...]
Pattern-based identification and mapping of landscape types using multi-thematic data
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
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
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?
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 [...]