Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
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 2 degrees C requires nature-based climate solutions which are expected to supply more than a third of cost-effective climate mitigation by 2030. 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 hectares. Projects using the Human Induced [...]
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: 2025-05-21
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 [...]
Accounting for biodiversity impacts of consumption and production: current gaps and frontiers.
Published: 2025-05-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
The way humans produce and consume material goods continues to be a primary driving force on biodiversity decline. Despite significant advances in quantifying biodiversity footprints, important differences exist across types of approaches and indicators. These include, what aspects of biodiversity are measured and how they are reported. In this scoping review, we provide an overview of [...]
Decline of the globally rare old-growth specklebelly lichen, Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis, and its implications for temperate rainforest conservation
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology
Epiphytic lichens are key components of temperate rainforests, where they contribute to forest hydrology, nutrient cycles, food webs, and overall biomass and biodiversity. Despite their ecological importance and sensitivity to environmental change few protections exist for lichen conservation and management. Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis, or old-growth specklebelly lichen, is considered an [...]
Designing Multi-Modal Ecosystem Monitoring Technologies: A Network of Networks Approach
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Software Engineering
The central promise of ecosystem monitoring technologies — like bioacoustic, camera trap, citizen science, eDNA, and satellite data — is to reveal changes in the structure and composition of the Earth’s ecological systems to facilitate timely and effective conservation action. Following the evolution and maturation of these technology systems, the fusion of multimodal observation systems — where [...]
Spatially varying population indices
Published: 2025-04-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Population Biology
Large scale monitoring is fundamental for reliably tracking the fate of animal populations under changing environments and land-use practices. A common application of large scale population monitoring data is to produce indices of temporal change in species abundances, which are used in environmental policy assessments of species and biodiversity statuses. For index estimation, spatio-temporal [...]
theRmalUAV: an R package to clean and correct thermal UAV data for accurate land surface temperatures
Published: 2025-03-01
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Software Engineering
Thermal cameras mounted on unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly utilized across various environmental research fields, including hydrological modelling, wildfire detection, urban heat island studies, microclimate and precision agriculture. However, several steps are needed to convert the measured thermal signal to more relevant land surface temperature (LST). Since a number of users [...]
Different sources of wind turbine data produce sharp differences in collision risk estimates for foraging vultures
Published: 2024-12-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Monitoring, Systems Biology, Zoology
Multiple studies assessed the collision risk of different vulture species with wind turbines. However, they relied on different sources of wind turbine data, and the effect of this data heterogeneity, on the estimated collision risk and the comparability of these assessments, has not been investigated. We used GPS and accelerometer data, collected from 6 adult Griffon Vultures living in Sardinia [...]
Twenty years of dynamic occupancy models: a review of applications and look to the future
Published: 2024-10-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation
Understanding patterns of species occupancy across landscapes and throughout time is a long-standing objective of ecological research that has inspired the development of numerous quantitative modelling approaches. However, estimating occupancy can be a challenge, particularly when contending with issues like imperfect detection and shifting distributions. Dynamic occupancy models (DOMs) offer a [...]
Snow persistence influences vegetation metrics central to Arctic greening analyses
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring
Satellite imagery is critical for understanding land-surface change in the rapidly warming Arctic. Since the 1980s, studies have found positive trends in the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from satellite imagery over the Arctic - commonly referred to as ‘Arctic greening’ and assumed to represent increased vegetation productivity. However, greening analyses use satellite [...]
Making use of spatially biased variables in ecosystem condition accounting – a GIS based workflow
Published: 2024-06-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring
Ecosystem Condition Accounts (ECA) should reflect the integrity or quality of all nature inside the scope of the account, and therefore rely on spatially representative indicators for condition. All ECAs are subject to data constraints in some way. Therefore, being able to make use of spatially biased data sets would be very valuable. For national ECAs, modelling approaches can in some cases be [...]
Global metrics for terrestrial biodiversity
Published: 2024-06-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation
Biodiversity metrics are increasingly in demand for informing government, business, and civil society decisions. However, it is not always clear to end users how these metrics differ or for what purpose they are best suited. We seek to answer these questions using a database of 573 biodiversity-related metrics, indicators, indices, and layers, which address aspects of genetic diversity, species, [...]