Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Other Life Sciences
Proactive Tundra Conservation Strategy for a Rapidly Changing Arctic
Published: 2025-04-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Warming induced forest expansion, permafrost thaw, and human activities are major drivers affecting the biodiversity and ecosystem functions of the Arctic tundra. While the pace of climate warming is fastest in the Arctic, some important stressors, like forest expansion, seem relatively slow. The slow response might provide the opportunity to safeguard Arctic biodiversity and ecosystem function [...]
The State of Global Catastrophic Risk Research: A Bibliometric Review
Published: 2024-11-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Food Science, Geography, Other Life Sciences
The global catastrophic risk (GCR) and existential risk (ER) literature focuses on analysing and preventing potential major global catastrophes including a human extinction event. Over the past two decades, the field of GCR/ER research has grown considerably. However, there has been little meta-research on the field itself. How large has this body of literature become? What topics does it cover? [...]
Vulnerability to climate change: An analysis of its conceptualization in Mexico
Published: 2024-11-15
Subjects: Other Life Sciences
The concept of climate change vulnerability (CCV) has become an angular one for understanding the differential impacts of climate change (CC). It has evolved from multiple disciplines, leading to a diversity of conceptual frameworks. Particularly, in Mexico – where CCV research and practice have increased – such diversity has resulted in a lack of clarity on how to operationalize it, and limited [...]
Land management controls on soil carbon fluxes in Asia’s largest tropical grassland
Published: 2024-05-17
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Life Sciences
Land management changes threaten the ecological functionality of grassland ecosystems worldwide, including the ability of these ecosystems to store carbon in their soils. The Banni grasslands, Asia’s largest tropical grassland, is no different in this regard. Despite being a highly biodiverse ecosystem with an extensive land use history, information on soil carbon fluxes in this ecosystem remains [...]
The long journey of a benzodiazepine
Published: 2024-03-08
Subjects: Other Life Sciences
Medications make up 12-25% of health care’s greenhouse gas emissions production. By utilizing a life cycle analysis approach, this article lays out each step of production and disposal and estimates the global journey of a generic clonazepam pill. Generic clonazepam was selected because it is a commonly prescribed medication and is often linked to deprescribing initiatives due to its [...]
Comment on Hodgkins et al. (2018)
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Biochemistry, Other Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Hodgkins et al. (2018) used mid infrared spectra (MIRS) to make inferences about the stability of peat against decomposition along a latitudinal gradient from the tropics to northern latitudes. Recently, we have shown that these spectral prediction models are biased and their predictions more uncertain than considered in Hodgkins et al. (2018) (Teickner and Knorr (2022)). Here, we show what [...]
Calling for a National Model Benchmarking Facility
Published: 2023-04-14
Subjects: Biology, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Life Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Systems Biology
The modern world uses predictive computer models for many important purposes, including weather predictions, epidemic management, flood forecasting and warnings, and economic policymaking. We need to know how much we can trust the projections of these models, not only to achieve more accurate projections for systems, but also to undertake scientific learning about systems by incrementally testing [...]
Contribution of zooplankton nutrient recycling and effects on phytoplankton size structure in a hypereutrophic reservoir
Published: 2022-02-17
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Consumer nutrient recycling influences aquatic ecosystem functioning by altering the movement and transformation of nutrients. In hypereutrophic reservoirs, zooplankton nutrient recycling has been considered negligible due to high concentrations of available nutrients. A comparative analysis (Moody and Wilkinson, 2019) found that zooplankton communities in hypereutrophic lakes are dominated by [...]
The challenge of setting ‘climate ready’ ecological targets for environmental flow planning
Published: 2021-12-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Life Sciences
Implementing environmental flows has emerged as a major restoration tool for addressing the impacts of hydrologic alteration in large river systems. The ‘natural flow paradigm’ has been a central guiding principle for determining important ecohydrological relationships. Yet, climate change and associated changes in rainfall run off relationships, seasonality of flows, disruptions to food webs and [...]
What’s obstructing climate change adaptation in environmental water management?
Published: 2021-12-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Life Sciences
Climate change is irreversibly changing the water cycle, yet existing environmental flow assessment methods often fail to recognise the non stationarity of hydro climatic systems. Failure to do so will lead to the inability of environmental water management to achieve its restoration targets. Australia has undergone major reform over the past twelve years to recover water from consumptive use for [...]
Environmental Flows Assessments in the face of uncertainty: supporting the adaptive management of environmental flows
Published: 2021-12-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Life Sciences
Adaptive management has become the preferred approach for managing environmental flows globally, and successful implementation recognizes multiple dimensions of variability and complexity in socio-ecological systems. This paper outlines an environmental flow assessment methodology that explicitly addresses the uncertainty and change inherent in adaptively managing multiple values for management [...]
Chevrons: origin and relevance for the reconstruction of past wind regimes
Published: 2020-12-15
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Meteorology, Other Life Sciences, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Since its first use in the late 80’s, the term chevron has been employed in numerous studies to describe large U- and V-shaped ridges found in or near shorelines worldwide. Most studies have so far focused on Bahamian chevrons that are exclusively of Late Pleistocene age, and on the supposed Holocene chevrons found in S-Madagascar and Australia. In the Bahamas, these deposits have been [...]
A newly reconciled data set for identifying sea level rise and variability in Dublin Bay
Published: 2020-05-28
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Earth Sciences, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Statistics and Probability
We provide an updated sea level dataset for Dublin for the period 1938 to 2016 at yearly resolution. Using a newly collated sea level record for Dublin Port, as well as two nearby tide gauges at Arklow and Howth Harbour, we perform data quality checks and calibration of the Dublin Port record by adjusting the biased high water level measurements that affect the overall calculation of mean sea [...]
Identification of Hydrologic Landscapes in Brazilian basins and its application as indicator of water yield and storage
Published: 2020-04-09
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This study aimed to use the Hydrologic Landscapes as environmental classification method in the Piracicaba, Capivari and Jundiaí river basins, validate and use it as an indicator of water yield and storage areas. The method comprises in the same Information Plan (IP) factors that interact with the hydrological cycle in its terrestrial phase. The state of São Paulo, where most of the area is [...]
Northern peatland depth and lateral expansion is inconsistent with a 1055 GtC estimate of carbon storage
Published: 2020-03-04
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Peatlands contain one of the largest stores of terrestrial carbon and exert a considerable influence on the global climate cycle. However, both the magnitude of the peatland carbon pool and the development of this pool through time are poorly constrained. In a recently published article, Nichols and Peteet combine basal radiocarbon dates from palaeoecological studies with previously published [...]