Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Natural Resources and Conservation

Reef fish functional groups show variable declines due to deforestation-driven sedimentation, while flexible harvesting mitigates this damage

Russell Anderson Milne, Madhur Anand, Chris T. Bauch

Published: 2024-01-22
Subjects: Dynamic Systems, Natural Resources and Conservation, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Sedimentation is a major coral reef stressor, with effects including suppressing algae consumption by herbivorous fish. This puts pressure on reef fish populations and the fisheries that harvest them. Deforestation causes much sedimentation on reefs, and is an ongoing concern in Pacific island states. Although ecosystem processes like deforestation and fish population dynamics are usually far [...]

The role of deadwood in the carbon cycle: Implications for models, forest management, and future climates

Baptiste Joseph Wijas, Steven D Allison, Amy T Austin, et al.

Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Deadwood represents a significant carbon pool in forests and savannas. Although previous research has focused mainly on forests, we synthesise deadwood studies across all ecosystems with woody vegetation. Storage and release of carbon from deadwood is controlled by interacting decomposition drivers including biotic consumers (animals, microbes) and abiotic factors (water, fire, sunlight, [...]

Switching to bioplastics may exacerbate ingestion of lost and discarded fishing gear by marine invertebrates

Sandra Powell, Benjamin Mos

Published: 2024-01-09
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Biology, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sustainability

Bioplastics are argued to be more environmentally sustainable than conventional plastics. Yet, little is known about how bioplastics degrade in marine environments or their likelihood of being ingested by animals. We measured changes in the weight of biodegradable, semi-biodegradable, and non-biodegradable fishing gears (soft plastic lures, SPLs) in or out of seawater over 14 days. We then [...]

Fuentes para el Estudio de la historia de extracción, consumo y comercio de tres especies de aves venezolanas amenazadas

José Rafael Ferrer-Paris

Published: 2023-11-22
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation

El comercio y uso de vida silvestre es un problema complejo que se ve afectado por la dinámica temporal y geográfica de las redes de comercio y tráfico que estimulan la extracción y consumo de recursos. Para estudiar la historia de valoración, consumo y tráfico de la cotorra cabeciamarilla (Amazona barbadensis), el cardenalito (Sporagra cucullata) y el paují copete de piedra (Pauxi pauxi) [...]

Leveraging surf breaks to expand conservation of carbon-dense coastal ecosystems

Jacob J Bukoski, Scott R Atkinson, Marissa Anne S. Miller, et al.

Published: 2023-10-23
Subjects: Forest Management, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences

Surf breaks are increasingly recognized as socio-environmental phenomena that provide opportunities for biodiversity conservation and sustained benefits for local communities. Here, we examine an additional benefit from conserving surf breaks—their coincidence with carbon dense coastal ecosystems. Using global spatial datasets of irrecoverable carbon (defined as carbon stocks that, if lost today, [...]

Towards causal relationships for modelling species distribution

Daniele Da Re, Enrico Tordoni, Jonathan Lenoir, et al.

Published: 2023-10-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Statistical Models

1. Understanding the processes underlying the distribution of species through space and time is fundamental in several research fields spanning from ecology to spatial epidemiology. Correlative species distribution models (SDMs) involve popular statistical tools to infer species geographical distribution thanks to spatiotemporally explicit observations of species occurrences coupled with a set of [...]

HeliCat Canada’s Wildlife Observations Program: Trends and Findings 2012-2022

Steven Foster Wilson

Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Natural Resources and Conservation

HeliCat Canada members operating in mountain caribou range have been collecting and reporting wildlife sightings data since 2010, resulting in more than 3,750 spatially referenced sightings of animals and tracks by the end of the 2022 operating season. Mountain caribou, mountain goats, and wolverine have been the most commonly recorded species, with caribou observations generally declining over [...]

Landscape changes in the “valli da pesca” of the Venice lagoon and possible effects on the Ecosystem Services supply

Alice Stocco, Lorenzo Duprè, Fabio Pranovi

Published: 2023-06-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Nature and Society Relations, Other Environmental Sciences, Remote Sensing, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Coastal lagoons have long been subject to continuous changes caused by mutual interactions with human activities. Monitoring such changes becomes critical, particularly when modifications in landscape and land cover classes can affect their capacity to ensure Ecosystem Services (ESs). In the Venice lagoon, some confined areas called “valli da pesca” supply provisioning ESs, namely aquaculture and [...]

Community-based conservation and restoration in coastal wetlands: A review

Alex C Moore, Sumant Kumble

Published: 2023-06-19
Subjects: Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy

Research has shown that conservation and restoration efforts that engage local communities are more successful at meeting stated goals than those that are externally controlled. Such participatory management approaches have been increasingly applied in coastal wetland ecosystems, yet our collective understanding of the scope of methods applied and outcomes observed in these efforts is limited. In [...]

Emerging opportunities for wildlife with sustainable autonomous transportation

Inês Silva, Justin M. Calabrese

Published: 2021-09-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability

Autonomous vehicles (AV) are expected to play a key role in the future of transportation, and to introduce a disruptive yet potentially beneficial change for wildlife-vehicle interactions. How-ever, this assumption has not been critically examined, and reducing the number of wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) may be beyond current technological capabilities. Here, we introduce a new conceptual [...]

Drivers of the live pet trade: the role of species traits, socioeconomic attributes and regulatory systems

Adam Toomes, Pablo García‐Díaz, Oliver C. Stringham, et al.

Published: 2021-08-27
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

The live pet trade is a major driver of both biodiversity loss and the introduction of invasive alien species. Building a comprehensive understanding of the pet trade would improve prediction of conservation and biosecurity threats, with the aim to prevent further negative impacts. We used South Australia’s native wildlife permit reporting system as a data-rich example of a live vertebrate pet [...]

Seasonally variable relationships between surface water temperature and inflow in the upper San Francisco Estuary

Samuel M Bashevkin, Brian Mahardja

Published: 2021-06-23
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 [...]

Global economic and diet transitions drove Latin American and Caribbean forest change during the first decade of the century.

David Lopez-Carr, Sadie Jane Ryan, Matthew Clark

Published: 2021-03-31
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) contain more tropical high-biodiversity forest than the remaining areas of the planet combined, yet experienced more than a third of global deforestation during the first decade of the 21st century. While drivers of forest change occur at multiple scales, we examined forest change at the municipal and national scales integrated with global processes such as [...]

Oropendola nest predation and rodent consumption by the black-capped capuchin (Sapajus apella) in the Manu Biosphere Reserve, Peru

Andrew Lee, Michelle Huang

Published: 2021-03-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

The Neotropical primate Sapajus apella (Linnaeus, 1758), the black-capped capuchin monkey, is widely distributed across the Amazon basin (Boubli et al., 2020). Capuchins are generalist platyrrhines, occurring in most tropical forest types, where they forage opportunistically (Sabbatini et al., 2008; Lynch Alfaro et al., 2012; Boubli et al., 2020). They exploit a diverse variety of food sources, [...]

Recent advances of quantitative modeling to support invasive species eradication on islands

Christopher Baker, Michael Bode

Published: 2020-09-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

The eradication of invasive species from islands is an important part of managing these ecologically unique and at-risk regions. Island eradications are complex projects and mathematical models play an important role in supporting efficient and transparent decision-making. In this review we cover the past applications of modelling to island eradications, which range from large-scale [...]

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