Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Natural Resources and Conservation
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
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 was to [...]
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 [...]
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 Framework for Questionable Research Practices in Ecological Modelling
Published: 2026-02-20
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resource Management
1. Questionable research practices (QRPs) bias the published literature towards apparently strong and conclusive results, resulting in low rates of replicability. Recent metaresearch reveals that ecology is not immune to the ‘reproducibility crisis’ seen in other disciplines, due to similar rates of QRPs and a lack of transparency in published research. However, metaresearch to date focuses on [...]
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 [...]
A Practitioner-Led Transdisciplinary Process for Adaptive Fire Management in Madagascar’s Protected Areas
Published: 2026-01-19
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation
ABSTRACT Fire management in protected areas is constrained by gaps between scientific knowledge, practitioner experience, and institutional frameworks. Such constraints restrict how existing expertise is mobilised, formalised, and translated into alternative fire management practice, meaning fire management plans frequently fail to reflect the diverse socio-ecological contexts in which [...]
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 [...]
Quantifying Three Decades of Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining Frontiers in the Guiana Shield (1995–2024)
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 and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM) is a leading driver of tropical deforestation and forest degradation, yet its spatial and temporal dynamics remain largely underexplored. Here, we present a pan-regional, annual time-series analysis of ASGM expansion across rainforests of the Guiana Shield (Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana) from 1995 to 2024. Using Landsat imagery, we trained a deep [...]
From patterns to predictions: A framework for the spatial epidemiology of wildlife diseases
Published: 2025-12-08
Subjects: Animal Diseases, Biodiversity, Epidemiology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Statistics and Probability, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Veterinary Preventive Medicine, Epidemiology, and Public Health, Zoology
Wildlife diseases pose a significant threat to public health, livestock, and biodiversity conservation. In this context, spatial epidemiology offers a robust framework for elucidating disease dynamics and informing policy-making and disease management. The workflow in spatial epidemiology involves three main steps: (1) descriptive analysis of spatial dynamics; (2) exploration of the observed [...]
Navigating forest dieback and climate succession: Practical guidance for forest managers
Published: 2025-10-16
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Pathology, Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration
Australia’s forests and woodlands are entering a period of rapid ecological change, driven primarily by the impacts of climate change. The landscape is shifting from one of relative stability to one marked by uncertainty, novel threats, and complex interactions between climate, disturbance, and forest health. This means that forest managers must reconsider established approaches and assumptions [...]
England’s statutory biodiversity metric offers lessons in ensuring metrics for nature markets measure true change
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy
The need for standardized metrics for measuring losses and gains in biodiversity has resulted in many countries, and private sector initiatives, looking to adapt the England’s Statutory Biodiversity Metric for mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG). BNG requires a minimum 10% uplift in biodiversity units out of infrastructure development, and these number of biodiversity units depends in part on [...]
Herbarium specimens reveal long-term decline in pollination services since in the 1970s
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Anthropogenic change has resulted in pollinator decline and altered plant-pollinator interactions. This may drive widespread declines in pollination and reproductive success of plants, yet few datasets allow us to track changes in pollination services over time. Herbaria provide a unique opportunity to assess pollination services across broad spatial and temporal scales, and the associated [...]
Progress toward sustainable management of marine crustacean fisheries
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Population Biology
Marine crustacean capture fisheries have been contributing increasingly more to global aquatic food production in recent decades, helping secure socioeconomic benefits. In the past decade the landings of marine crustaceans rose by more than 67% while expanding spatially and taxonomically, doubling their contribution to global fisheries landings. Although efforts to improve the data collection [...]