Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Natural Resources and Conservation
Probabilistic projections of human modification of the terrestrial biosphere from 2020 to 2040
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Conservation actions are more effective when they anticipate future threats rather than respond only after loss occurs. Most spatial forecasts focus only on land-cover change and fail to capture the broader set of pressures that degrade biodiversity. To close this gap, we develop global probabilistic forecasts of cumulative human modification (HM), a continuous measure that combines 16 [...]
Aligning evidence and action: The Research-to-Decision (RED) Framework to address modern environmental and ecological challenges
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Databases and Information Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Models and Methods, Multivariate Analysis, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
Ecological and biodiversity crises are intensifying amid rapid advances in sensing, computation, and artificial intelligence (AI). AI offers unprecedented capabilities to understand complex ecological systems, provided outputs are interpretable, applied responsibly, and evaluated by domain experts. When addressing key challenges, science-policy frictions arise through different requirements [...]
Beyond the prohibition list: redirecting negative subsidies into positive incentives could mitigate overfishing and protect coastal communities in WTO fisheries reform
Published: 2026-09-22
Subjects: Environmental Policy, Environmental Studies, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation
The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies is a landmark in multilateral environmental governance, yet its current phase of negotiations on addressing subsidies that contribute to overcapacity and overfishing is contentious due to perceived welfare risks for small-scale fishers. In framing the debate around prohibiting subsidies, negotiators have thus far given little [...]
wildtag.ai: an open-access end-to-end offline AI-assisted desktop application for managing camera trap projects
Published: 2026-09-01
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Bioinformatics, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Camera traps generate massive volumes of data, yet their decision-support potential is diluted by the bottleneck of manual processing. Automated classification has largely solved this, but classification alone does not remove the barriers to adoption: it must be coupled with the means to turn predictions into a verified, shareable dataset, which no existing tool does end-to-end, offline, and [...]
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 [...]
Deep Learning for Combating Wildlife and Environmental Crime: A Survey
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Wildlife and Environmental Crime (WEC) describes illegal activities that threaten biodiversity and harm the environment. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has shown strong potential in combating WEC by learning complex patterns in data through the extraction of high-dimensional features. DL also offers powerful capabilities for prediction, classification, and object tracking, and has become an [...]
Fire regime assumptions can drastically influence pyrodiversity-biodiversity relationships in heterogeneous forest landscapes
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Management, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Background. Higher spatio-temporal variation in fire regime attributes in fire-dominated landscapes (pyrodiversity) is thought to promote higher levels of biodiversity – the pyrodiversity-biodiversity hypothesis – yet this effect likely varies across taxa and systems. As a result, ecosystem-based management in heterogenous, fire-dominated forests requires understanding the strength and shape of [...]
Meeting Mediterranean conservation targets through systematic conservation planning
Published: 2026-07-23
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 [...]
Efficient Bayesian Estimation for Open Population Capture-Recapture Models Without Data Augmentation
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
1. Bayesian estimation of abundance with capture-recapture data has been dominated for nearly 20 years by the parameter-expansion data-augmentation (PX-DA) ap- proach. The PX-DA approach expands the parameter set to include the latent true states of the individuals. PX-DA allows straightforward coding of models in MCMC software such as JAGS (Just Another Gibbs Sampler) or nimble, however, this [...]
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 [...]
Advancing public pro-environmental action for global seagrass conservation
Published: 2026-06-12
Subjects: Environmental Education, Environmental Studies, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Psychology, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences
Seagrass meadows support biodiversity, climate mitigation, and human well-being, yet remain threatened by interacting anthropogenic pressures. Public engagement is increasingly promoted in seagrass conservation, but the behaviours most relevant to reducing seagrass decline remain poorly defined. We surveyed 172 seagrass knowledge holders from 39 countries and territories, representing 1942 [...]
Modelling habitat selection using tracking data from central place foraging species: A practical guide for ecologists
Published: 2026-06-04
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Behavior and Ethology, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
The study of habitat selection has long been at the heart of ecological research and is critical to deciphering the mechanisms that govern species’ responses to global change. This is particularly important for central place foraging species, whose ability to adapt to shifting environmental conditions and anthropogenic disturbance is limited by persistent attachment to a fixed site. Recent [...]
Predicting substrate size at a watershed scale to inform conservation planning for a declining salmonid species
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Biology, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Good quality spawning habitat is critical for fish embryo development, survival, and overall population productivity. Appropriate riverbed substrate size is particularly important for riverine-spawning salmonids but the availability of suitable substrate may vary across a watershed. Predicting substrate size at watershed extents may therefore be critical to inform management and conservation of [...]