Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
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. [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
Seasonally variable relationships between surface water temperature and inflow in the upper San Francisco Estuary
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
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
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 [...]
FIRED (Fire Events Delineation): An open, flexible algorithm & database of US fire events derived from the MODIS burned area product (2001-19)
Published: 2020-06-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Harnessing the fire data revolution, i.e., the abundance of information from satellites, government records, social media, and human health sources, now requires complex and challenging data integration approaches. Defining fire events is key to that effort. In order to understand the spatial and temporal characteristics of fire, or the classic fire regime concept, we need to critically define [...]
Experimenting with the past to improve environmental monitoring programs
Published: 2019-10-14
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Long-term monitoring programs are a fundamental part of both understanding system dynamics and informing management decisions. However, monitoring programs not always designed to consider statistical power, site selection, or the full costs and benefits of monitoring. Further, data from monitoring programs with different goals and protocols are now being combined for comparative analyses. Key [...]
Toward a Pluralistic Conception of Resilience
Published: 2019-06-29
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Computer Sciences, Dynamic Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Other Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability, Systems Biology
The concept of resilience occupies an increasingly prominent position within contemporary efforts to confront many of modernitys most pressing challenges, including global environmental change, famine, infrastructure, poverty, and terrorism, to name but a few. Received views of resilience span a broad conceptual and theoretical terrain, with a diverse range of application domains and settings. In [...]
A protocol for using drones to assist monitoring of large breeding bird colonies
Published: 2019-04-29
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology
Drones are rapidly becoming part of environmental monitoring and management applications. They provide an opportunity to improve a number of activities related to monitoring population dynamics of aggregations of wildlife. Bird surveys using drones have attracted particular attention, with a range of potential metrics able to be derived from high resolution drone imagery. Whilst a number of [...]
A continental measure of urbanness predicts avian response to local urbanization
Published: 2019-03-26
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Understanding species-specific relationships with their environment is essential for ecology, biogeography, and conservation biology. Moreover, understanding how these relationships change with spatial scale is critical to mitigating potential threats to biodiversity. But methods which measure inter-specific variation in responses to environmental parameters, generalizable across multiple spatial [...]
Monitoring large and complex wildlife aggregations with drones
Published: 2019-01-02
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
• Recent advances in drone technology have rapidly led to their use for monitoring and managing wildlife populations but a broad and generalised framework for their application to complex wildlife aggregations is still lacking • We present a generalised semi-automated approach where machine learning can map targets of interest in drone imagery, supported by predictive modelling for estimating [...]