Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Sustainability
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, [...]
Meeting Mediterranean conservation targets through systematic conservation planning
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
The ocean is increasingly being used by new human activities, fueled by an expansion of the “blue-economy” adding new pressures to the marine environment. These changes are happening fast, and balancing biodiversity conservation and present and future uses of the marine space needs to be done in an equitable way for human and ecological communities. Here, we used a systematic conservation [...]
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 [...]
robust.prioritizr: Robust Systematic Conservation Prioritization
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Climate change poses significant threats to biodiversity. To ensure the long-term persistence of species, protected areas must be established in locations that will safeguard suitable habitats in the future. Although statistical models can predict where such habitats may occur under different future scenarios, designing protected areas that can effectively protect these habitats across a wide [...]
Overview of evidence on agroforestry's role in biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation and adaptation in low- and middle-income countries
Published: 2026-06-16
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
Agroforestry has been promoted as one solution to make agriculture more ecologically sustainable. While research has examined its effects on biodiversity and on climate change mitigation and adaptation separately, comprehensive reviews linking these outcomes remain lacking. This review fills that gap. We searched six academic databases in June 2025, retrieving 12,175 unique records. Screening [...]
Navigating Spatial Trade-offs in Restoration Planning: A Multi-Objective Optimization Framework Integrating Ecological Feasibility
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecosystem restoration requires decision-support tools capable of balancing ecological benefits under limited resources while explicitly accounting for the long-term likelihood of restoration success. Despite its recognized importance, ecological feasibility has rarely been formulated as an optimization objective in spatial planning, typically being treated only as a constraint or biophysical [...]
Towards Nature Positive supply chains: From biodiversity commitments to organisational action
Published: 2026-05-21
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 [...]
Thermodynamic heterogeneity patterns reveal higher-order soil organization in indigenous agroecosystems of the U.S. Southwest
Published: 2026-03-12
Subjects: Dynamic Systems, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Remote Sensing, Science and Technology Studies, Soil Science, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Patterns of soil spatial heterogeneity and diversity support the stability and productivity of food systems, yet their multidimensional structure remains difficult to quantify at spatial scales relevant to agricultural resilience. A process-based framework grounded in fundamental physical principles is therefore needed to describe these spatial processes across landscapes. The aim of this study [...]
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 [...]
Delivering Nature Positive outcomes through landscape conservation: credible actions and shared responsibility in the mining sector
Published: 2026-01-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
The mining sector is increasingly expected to align their corporate nature commitments with global biodiversity goals. Emerging Nature Positive frameworks require companies not only to mitigate impacts of direct operations, but also to contribute to biodiversity recovery at the landscape scale, where impacts, dependencies and conservation priorities intersect. Yet expectations for credible [...]
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 [...]
Mapping Cultural Ecosystem Service Flows from Social Media Imagery with Vision–Language Models: A Zero-Shot CLIP Framework
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Computational Engineering, Computer Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability
Geotagged social media imagery provides a valuable source for mapping cultural ecosystem service (CES) flows, which represent realized human interactions with nature, yet its open-world user-generated content poses challenges to automated content analysis. Supervised models require large labeled datasets and show limited generalization across contexts, whereas unsupervised approaches often need [...]
Three Decades of Artisanal Gold Mining Reveal Contrasting Outcomes for Conservation Areas and Indigenous Lands
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 gold mining (AGM) is a critical driver of tropical forest disturbance, yet is challenging to quantify. Using deep learning and three decades of satellite imagery (1995-2024), we mapped AGM expansion across three contrasting countries in northern Amazonia. We evaluate mining trends, and extent across differing land designations and associated impacts on carbon stocks. AGM area increased [...]
A Typology of Corporate Actions for a Nature-Positive Future
Published: 2025-10-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Sustainability
Reaching the global goal of halting and reversing biodiversity loss will require a step-change in corporate action. Whilst clear guidance already exists for companies to take responsibility for and mitigate biodiversity loss caused by their own operations, delivering global nature-positive outcomes requires higher ambition and extended accountability for impacts beyond companies’ direct control. [...]