Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
An Interpretable Machine Learning Framework for River Water Hardness Classification
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Sustainability
Determining water hardness in the field currently relies on laboratory Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) titration or single-proxy electrical conductivity (EC) measurements, both of which have significant limitations. This study investigates whether routine in situ physicochemical parameters can accurately classify river water hardness without laboratory analysis. Using samples from a river [...]
Mapping monitoring resources to support progress tracking of global biodiversity-related commitments
Published: 2026-07-31
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
To address global biodiversity declines, governments have committed to ambitious biodiversity-related international policy goals and targets. In parallel, there has been rapid growth in datasets and monitoring resources, which has collectively increased the capacity to track progress towards these global commitments. However, a clear overview of how resources map to these commitments is lacking, [...]
The Global Ecosystems Atlas: comprehensive and systematic mapping of Earth's ecosystems
Published: 2026-07-31
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geography, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Halting and reversing biodiversity loss is central to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, yet a lack of consistent, spatially comprehensive data on ecosystem distributions has undermined our ability to monitor progress against its goals and targets. Here we introduce the Global Ecosystems Atlas initiative, convened by the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO) in [...]
Biodiversity Externality Costs Through Supply Chain: A pass-Through Input-Output Framework for Biodiversity Financial Impact Assessment
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Studies, Other Economics
Transition biodiversity risk is increasingly recognised as a source of financial risk, yet no framework exists to translate firm-level biodiversity impacts into credit risk metrics comparable to those developed for climate transition risk or even biodiversity dependency risk. This paper fills that gap by adapting the cost pass-through input-output methodology, established in the climate [...]
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 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 [...]
Mapping microclimate temperatures in open ecosystems using UAVs: a comparison between thermal, correlative, and mechanistic approaches
Published: 2026-06-09
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring
Open terrestrial ecosystems exhibit pronounced fine scale thermal heterogeneity, yet spatially continuous microclimate data at biologically relevant heights and scales remain scarce. Here, we evaluate three unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV) informed approaches for mapping microclimate temperatures, including land surface temperature (LST) and near surface air temperature (T13cm), in an open [...]
Towards Nature Positive supply chains: From biodiversity commitments to organisational action
Published: 2026-05-22
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 [...]
The Global Biodiversity Framework supports global assessment of One Health actions
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences, Public Health
The One Health approach promotes collaboration across disciplines to enhance the health of humans, animals, plants, and the environment. Recently developed by the Quadripartite organizations, the One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022-2026) supports countries in adopting the One Health approach through six action tracks. The tracks address multiple aspects of biodiversity, containing guiding [...]
Multi-scale collapse of coral cover under climate change
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Biology, Dynamic Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Marine Biology, Mathematics, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Survival Analysis, Systems Biology
Projecting ecosystem trajectories under future climates is critical for conservation planning, yet remains constrained by uncertainty arising from limited data, ecological complexity, and biological and environmental variability. Variability, when disentangled from uncertainty, offers critical insights into population and community dynamics. For example, enhanced vital rates (growth, survival, [...]
A Global Review of Wetland Biodiversity and Carbon Connections
Published: 2026-03-11
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy
As human actions have degraded global ecosystems over time, communities have often combated ecosystem function loss through restoration with a singular focus, falling on one side of the habitat and biodiversity protection or carbon sequestration dichotomy. Wetlands are no exception to this trend, and the large global push to protect and restore wetlands has widely ignored multiple-benefit [...]
Echo-dash: Keeping ecologists in the loop with an open source, online ecoacoustic dashboard for interactive exploration of spatiotemporal soundscape data
Published: 2026-03-08
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Population Biology, Software Engineering, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is being adopted in a range of contexts. Emerging methods facilitate analysis of large-scale data sets, but ecological interpretation of acoustic indices is not straightforward. In addition, the technical and logistical requirements of using emerging AI methods for big data mean that conservation actors increasingly adopt third-party analysis solutions. We argue [...]
Increasing land take in Europe’s land-water interface
Published: 2026-02-26
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation
Ecosystems at the interface between terrestrial and aquatic areas are of outstanding ecological and socio-economic importance, yet are under intense pressure due to the concentration of human settlement and agriculture. Despite this, the broader geography of the land-water interface and how it is changing remains poorly understood. Here, we develop an operationalizable definition of the [...]
A new analysis of biodiversity and conservation knowledge products to support environmental assessments
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sustainability
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) second global assessment of the state of biodiversity is in preparation, to be completed in 2028. To support this and other global and regional environmental assessments, we disaggregate three global knowledge products based on IUCN standards (the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Key Biodiversity [...]
Bridging Science and Policy: A Global Review of Socio-ecological Indicators Guiding Biodiversity Action
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Biology, Community-based Research, Environmental Monitoring, Human Ecology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Nature and Society Relations, Other Political Science, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
1. Biodiversity continues to decline despite a proliferation of indicators intended to inform conservation policy. We asked which socio-ecological indicators are actually reaching decision-makers, how they are used, and where critical gaps persist. 2. Following a scoping-review protocol and PRISMA workflow, we screened 906 documents in Web of Science and Scopus and analyzed 43 studies that [...]