Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
Quantifying Three Decades of Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining Frontiers in the Guiana Shield (1995–2024)
Published: 2025-12-09
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Remote Sensing, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM) is a leading driver of tropical deforestation and forest degradation, yet its spatial and temporal dynamics remain largely underexplored. Here, we present a pan-regional, annual time-series analysis of ASGM expansion across rainforests of the Guiana Shield (Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana) from 1995 to 2024. Using Landsat imagery, we trained a deep [...]
On the spatial aggregation of condition metrics for ecosystem accounting
Published: 2025-12-03
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
In face of the ongoing nature crisis, the international community is setting targets and deciding on actions to combat the current biodiversity crises. For this to be effective they need tools to accurately describe the current situation and to monitor trends in ecosystems over time. Ecosystem condition accounts (ECA) is one such tool that use variables and indicators to describe key ecosystem [...]
Machine Learning Forecasting of the Ecological and Economic Impacts of Red Tides in the Southwest Florida Coast
Published: 2025-11-25
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring
Red tides, a form of Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB), pose a severe threat to Florida’s wildlife, fisheries, and coastal communities. These blooms release harmful brevetoxins, which kill marine life and devastate fisheries, diminishing both yields and revenue. Consequently, coastal residents that rely on fishing and tourism are also detrimentally affected by red tides. With rising global temperatures, [...]
Navigating forest dieback and climate succession: Practical guidance for forest managers
Published: 2025-10-16
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Pathology, Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration
Australia’s forests and woodlands are entering a period of rapid ecological change, driven primarily by the impacts of climate change. The landscape is shifting from one of relative stability to one marked by uncertainty, novel threats, and complex interactions between climate, disturbance, and forest health. This means that forest managers must reconsider established approaches and assumptions [...]
GhostNetZero: AI for Detecting Marine Ghost Nets
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Marine Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Sustainability
Abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gears (ALDFG), commonly referred to as ghost nets, pose a persistent global threat to marine biodiversity. Constructed from durable synthetic polymers, ghost nets remain intact for decades, continuing to entangle and kill marine organisms while damaging habitats and imposing economic burdens on fisheries and coastal communities. Despite their [...]
Advancing single species abundance models by leveraging multi-species data to reveal lake-specific patterns for fisheries predictions
Published: 2025-09-03
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Predicting species abundance is critical for understanding ecological dynamics and guiding conservation and management strategies. Traditional species abundance models (SAMs) rely on environmental variables and the presence or absence of key species, but often overlook community context and unmeasured environmental variation. Community composition can serve as a proxy for both unobserved [...]
Long-read sequencing for biodiversity analyses - a comprehensive guide
Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
DNA-based monitoring of biodiversity has revolutionised our ability to describe communities and rapidly assess anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. Currently established molecular methods for biomonitoring rely heavily on classic metabarcoding utilising short reads, mostly through Illumina data. However, increasingly more studies use long-read sequencing technologies, such as Oxford Nanopore [...]
Herbarium specimens reveal long-term decline in pollination services since in the 1970s
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Anthropogenic change has resulted in pollinator decline and altered plant-pollinator interactions. This may drive widespread declines in pollination and reproductive success of plants, yet few datasets allow us to track changes in pollination services over time. Herbaria provide a unique opportunity to assess pollination services across broad spatial and temporal scales, and the associated [...]
Forest Carbon Diligence: Digital MRV for Jurisdictional and Voluntary Offsets Markets
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Forest Sciences, Technology and Innovation
Forest Carbon Diligence is a digital MRV system for mapping forest structure and forest carbon over time. This manuscript describes the qualities of the Diligence datasets — annual maps of canopy cover, canopy height, aboveground carbon density, change detection, and their uncertainties — and quantifies performance across multiple MRV contexts. Canopy height and canopy cover regression metrics [...]
In What Way Does Climate Change Matter!?
Published: 2025-07-04
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Inequality and Stratification, International and Intercultural Communication, Political Economy, Race and Ethnicity, Technology and Innovation
I introduce the methodology of my nonproliferation research with quantum electrodynamics with the negative image equivalence with Charge-Coupled Devices. With the minimalist evidence gathering approach, I argue for a cosmologically relevant perspective in climate change that keeps an eye on the thermonuclear environment of outer space. I give a pilot narrative on the transcultural communication [...]
Characterising the structural complexity across major habitats of Tenerife, Spain
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences
Understanding biodiversity changes across ecosystems requires the consideration of various biodiversity dimensions, such as habitat structural complexity – the degree of heterogeneity in the distribution of plant material in three-dimensional space. Yet, its inclusion in long-term biodiversity monitoring on oceanic islands remains limited. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can be used to quantify [...]
Mapping disturbance across California’s rapidly changing forests
Published: 2025-06-12
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
Disturbances shape assemblages and spatial patterns of flora and fauna across the globe, and accurate disturbance mapping can aid conservation science and decision-making. However, mapping and differentiating among disturbance types using remote sensing is challenging, especially in forests with hidden subcanopy disturbances. On federal lands in the western US, wildfire, drought, and fuels [...]
National-scale datasets systematically underestimate vegetation recovery in Australian carbon farming projects
Published: 2025-06-11
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring
Limiting global warming below 2C requires nature-based climate solutions which are expected to supply more than a third of cost-effective climate mitigation by 2030, while prioritising avoiding fossil fuel emissions. Regenerating native forests under the Australian Government’s Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) program are delivering large-scale carbon storage across approximately 3.4 million [...]
Minimum Sampling, Maximum Insight: Tracking Environmental Trends in a Tidal Estuary
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
Long-term environmental monitoring is essential for detecting ecological trends and managing dynamic systems. In estuarine environments, where monitoring is often constrained by cost and logistics, efficient resource allocation is key to sustaining effective programs. We developed a framework to optimize spatial and temporal sampling in the Great Bay Estuary (New Hampshire/Maine, USA), [...]
Toward Ecological Forecasting of West Nile Virus in Florida: Insights from Two Decades of Surveillance
Published: 2025-05-20
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Models, Virus Diseases
West Nile Virus (WNV) is the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the United States, yet transmission activity remains difficult to predict. This study used 20 years of digitized WNV seroconversion data from 526 sentinel chicken coops across Florida to develop spatiotemporal models with landscape and climate variables to predict WNV seroconversion at monthly and seasonal timescales. We [...]