Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring

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 [...]

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, development of wildlife sentinels for monitoring human exposure to toxins has been limited. Here, we capitalised on a three-decade long child blood lead monitoring program (> 20,000 measurements), to [...]

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 one of the most degraded marine ecosystems, prompting substantial efforts to restore them. While biodiversity gains of restored reefs are well documented, other ecosystem services such as water filtration remain overlooked. We tested whether modular baskets could provide a practical way to measure water filtration by invertebrate communities on restored reefs and assess [...]

Patterns and drivers of population trends on individual Breeding Bird Survey routes using spatially explicit models and route-level covariates

Adam C Smith, Veronica Aponte, Marie-Anne R. Hudson, et al.

Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models

Spatial patterns in population trends, particularly those at finer geographic scales, can help us better understand the factors driving population change in North American birds. The standard trend models for the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) were designed to estimate trends within broad geographic strata, such as countries, Bird Conservation Regions, U.S. states, and Canadian [...]

Uncovering global drivers threatening vegetation resilience

Camille Fournier de Lauriere, Katharina Runge, Gabriel Smith, et al.

Published: 2023-09-25
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Forest Biology

1) Context: The resilience of the Earth's vegetation is changing heterogeneously, making it a challenge to unveil what causes these resilience changes. Understanding the driving forces of these changes can help us make informed management decisions to protect and restore ecosystems. Here, we address this gap by identifying the drivers that have caused the resilience of ecosystems to change during [...]

Measuring historical pollution: natural history collections as tools for public health and environmental justice research

Shane DuBay, Brian C Weeks, Pamela E Davis-Kean, et al.

Published: 2023-07-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Health Policy, Inequality and Stratification, Nature and Society Relations, Public Policy, Urban Studies and Planning

Background: Through the industrial era, environmental pollution has been unevenly distributed in the environment, disproportionately impacting disenfranchised communities. The distribution of pollution is thus a question of environmental justice and public health that requires policy solutions. However, we lack robust quantitative data on pollutants for many locations and time periods because [...]

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 [...]

Improving ecological connectivity assessments with transfer learning and function approximation

Michael D Catchen, Michelle Lin, Timothée Poisot, et al.

Published: 2023-05-04
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Environmental Monitoring, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistical Models, Sustainability

This is a conference paper presented at the ICLR 2023 "Machine Learning for Remote Sensing" workshop. Protecting and restoring ecological connectivity is essential to climate change adaptation, and necessary if species are to shift their geographic distributions to track their suitable climatic conditions over the coming century. Despite the increasing availability of near real-time and high [...]

The missing link: discerning true from false negatives when sampling species interaction networks

Michael D Catchen, Timothée Poisot, Laura J. Pollock, et al.

Published: 2023-01-19
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring

Ecosystems are composed of networks of interacting species. These interactions allow communities of species to persist through time through both neutral and adaptive processes. Despite their importance, a robust understanding of (and ability to predict and forecast) interactions among species remains elusive. This knowledge-gap is largely driven by a shortfall of data—although species occurrence [...]

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. [...]

Uneven biodiversity sampling across redlined urban areas in the United States

Diego Ellis-Soto, Melissa Chapman, Dexter H Locke

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 [...]

Nutrient and phytoplankton dynamics of the Hunter River estuary

James Nicholas Hitchcock, Jordan Facey, Doug Westhopre, et al.

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. [...]

Seasonally variable relationships between surface water temperature and inflow in the upper San Francisco Estuary

Samuel M Bashevkin, Brian Mahardja

Published: 2021-06-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management

Water temperature and inflow are key environmental drivers in aquatic systems that are linked through a causal web of factors including climate, weather, water management, and their downstream linkages. However, we do not yet fully understand the relationship between inflow and water temperature, especially in complex managed systems such as estuaries. The San Francisco Estuary is the center of a [...]

Warming in the upper San Francisco Estuary: Patterns of water temperature change from 5 decades of data

Samuel M Bashevkin, Brian Mahardja, Larry R. Brown

Published: 2021-04-30
Subjects: Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Temperature is a key controlling variable from subcellular to ecosystem scales. Thus, climatic warming is expected to have broad impacts, especially in economically and ecologically valuable systems such as estuaries. The heavily managed upper San Francisco Estuary supplies water to millions of people and is home to fish species of high conservation, commercial, and recreational interest. Despite [...]

Global maps of soil temperature

Jonas J Lembrechts, Johan van den Hoogen, Juha Aalto, et al.

Published: 2021-03-21
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science

Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids thus fail to reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions are controlled and most terrestrial species reside. Here we provide global maps of soil [...]

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