Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Natural Resources and Conservation
Navigating Spatial Trade-offs in Restoration Planning: A Multi-Objective Optimization Framework Integrating Ecological Feasibility
Published: 2026-05-28
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 impacts 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, yet most of their impacts are hidden in complex supply chains. Robust strategies to fully identify, quantify, trace, and begin to mitigate these impacts remain rare. Here we present a generalisable workflow for assessing and addressing supply chain impacts on biodiversity and then apply it to the University of Oxford’s [...]
Fishers’ local knowledge strengthens seagrass restoration planning
Published: 2026-05-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Seagrass restoration is increasingly guided by habitat suitability models, yet restoration outcomes depend on more than biophysical suitability alone. In coastal social-ecological systems, fishers and anglers hold fine-scale, time-integrated knowledge of habitat condition, human use, and local constraints that are rarely incorporated at the outset of restoration planning. Here, we tested whether [...]
A Game-Theoretic and Dynamical-Systems Framework for Anti-Poaching Resource Allocation: A Case Study of Etosha National Park
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology
Wildlife poaching threatens biodiversity across sub-Saharan Africa, and is especially acute for critically endangered species such as the black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis). Etosha National Park, Namibia (22,935 km²), is patrolled by approximately 295 anti-poaching rangers—fewer than 0.02 per km²—posing two interlinked operational questions: where should a limited workforce be placed to maximise [...]
The number and changing global distribution of seagrass-proximate people
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Human Geography, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation
Seagrass meadows are increasingly recognised as critical natural capital, yet global seagrass conservation still lacks a basic human geography. Building on examples from forests, here, we provide the first global estimate of seagrass-proximate people, defined as people living within specified distances of known seagrass. We combined a global distribution layer of known, mapped and observed [...]
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 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 [...]