Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Other Life Sciences

Land management controls on soil carbon fluxes in Asia’s largest tropical grassland

Manan Bhan, Chetan Misher, Ankila J. Hiremath, et al.

Published: 2024-05-16
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

Harjas Kaur, Fiona Parascandalo, Emma Ko, et al.

Published: 2024-03-07
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)

Henning Teickner, Klaus-Holger Knorr

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

Benjamin Lyle Ruddell, Martyn Clark, Jessica M Driscoll, et al.

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

Tyler James Butts, Eric K Moody, Grace Marie Wilkinson

Published: 2022-02-16
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

Meegan Judd, Nicholas Bond, Avril Horne

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?

Meegan Judd, Martina Boese, Avril Horne, et al.

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

Avril Horne, J Angus Webb, Meghan Mussehl, et al.

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

Lucas Erouan Vimpere, Pascal Kindler, Sebastien Castelltort

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

Amin Shoari Nejad, Andrew Parnell, Alice Greene, et al.

Published: 2020-05-27
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

Matheus Henrique Mortene, Ronalton Evandro Machado

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

Joshua Lee Ratcliffe, Haijun Peng, Jelmer Nijp, et al.

Published: 2020-03-03
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 [...]

Machine learning for digital soil mapping: applications, challenges and suggested solutions

Alexandre M.J.-C. Wadoux, Budiman Minasny, Alex McBratney

Published: 2020-02-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences

The uptake of machine learning (ML) algorithms in digital soil mapping (DSM) is transforming the way soil scientists produce their maps. Machine learning is currently applied to mapping soil properties or classes much in the same way as other unrelated fields of science. Mapping of soil, however, has unique aspects which require adaptations of the ML algorithms. These features are for example, [...]

serac: a R package for ShortlivEd RAdionuclide Chronology of recent sediment cores

Rosalie Bruel, Pierre Sabatier

Published: 2020-01-17
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences

Short-lived radionuclides are measured in surface sediment to provide a geochronology for the past century. Age-depth models can be produced from 210Pbex activity-derived sedimentation rates and confirmed by 137Cs and 241Am activities that are result of fallout from nuclear weapon tests and the Chernobyl accident. Different methods of age depth modelling using such data require expertise in lake [...]

The environmental impacts of palm oil in context

Erik Meijaard, Thomas Brooks, Kimberly Carlson, et al.

Published: 2020-01-10
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Food Science, Life Sciences, Other Food Science, Other Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires balancing demands on land between agriculture (SDG 2) and biodiversity (SDG 15). The production of vegetable oils in general, and palm oil in particular, is perhaps the most controversial illustration of these trade-offs. Global annual demand for vegetable oil for food, animal feed and fuel is currently at 210 million tons1 (Mt), with [...]

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