Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Bad science and good intentions prevent effective climate action

Graeme MacDonald Taylor, Peter Wadhams, Daniele Visioni, et al.

Published: 2024-02-16
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Although the 2015 Paris Agreement climate targets seem certain to be missed, only a few experts are questioning the adequacy of the current approach to limiting climate change and suggesting that additional approaches are needed to avoid unacceptable catastrophes. This article posits that selective science communication and unrealistically optimistic assumptions are obscuring the reality that [...]

The Rapa Nui Little Ice Age drought: evidence, potential causes and socioecological impact

Valentí Rull

Published: 2024-01-11
Subjects: Paleontology, Sedimentology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

A decade ago, an island-wide drought was proposed to have occurred on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) during the Little Ice Age (LIA). This climatic event was considered to be important for ecological and cultural transformations that occurred on the island during the 16th and 17th centuries. Independent multiproxy paleoecological and paleoclimatic evidence produced in the last years supports the [...]

Open-source approach for reproducible substrate mapping using semantic segmentation on recreation-grade side scan sonar datasets

Cameron Scott Bodine, Daniel David Buscombe, Toby D. Hocking

Published: 2023-12-21
Subjects: Analysis, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Programming Languages and Compilers, Software Engineering, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management

Knowledge of the variation and distribution of substrates at large spatial extents in aquatic systems, particularly rivers, is severely lacking, impeding species conservation and ecosystem restoration efforts. Air and space-borne remote sensing important for terrestrial and atmospheric measurements are limited in benthic environments due to river stage, turbidity, and canopy cover, requiring [...]

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 [...]

Plastics aplenty in paddy lands: incidence of microplastics in two rice cultivars of Kerala, India, and its impact on primary producers found in paddy fields

C. Amaneesh, Hee-Sik Kim, Rishiram Ramanan

Published: 2023-11-14
Subjects: Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Toxicology

Microplastics (MP) have received worldwide attention in recent years because of its prevalence in key ecosystems, including agroecosystems. Occurrence of MP in native paddy fields, which are critical to world’s food security, is not reported till date. This study reports the abundance of MP in two different rice cultivars, one of which is the ‘Pokkali’ crop that is Geographical Indication tagged [...]

Wildfire smoke impacts lake ecosystems

Mary Jade Farruggia, Janice Brahney, Steven Sadro, et al.

Published: 2023-11-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Wildfire activity is increasing globally. The resulting smoke plumes can travel hundreds to thousands of kilometers, reflecting or scattering sunlight and depositing ash within ecosystems. Several key physical, chemical, and biological processes in lakes are controlled by factors affected by smoke. The spatial and temporal scales of lake exposure to smoke are extensive and underrecognized. We [...]

Clarifying the trophic state concept to advance limnology, management, and interdisciplinary collaboration

Michael Frederick Meyer, Benjamin M Kraemer, Carolina C Barbosa, et al.

Published: 2023-10-03
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Trophic state (TS) characterizes a waterbody’s biological productivity and depends on its morphometry, physics, chemistry, biology, climate, and history. However, multiple TS operational definitions have emerged to meet use-specific classification needs. These differing operational definitions can create inconsistent understanding, can lead to miscommunication, and can result in siloed [...]

Chapter 4. Bacterial and archaeal DNA from lake sediments

Aurèle Vuillemin, Marco J. L. Coolen, Jens Kallmeyer, et al.

Published: 2023-09-22
Subjects: Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

General microbial patterns of biogeography can be established based on sedimentary DNA (sedDNA) retrieved from diverse inland aquatic ecosystems, provided that certain variable environmental factors are taken into consideration in order to trace the admixture of prokaryotic sedDNA preserved in lacustrine sediments from source to sink. These include several watershed characteristics, such as [...]

National-scale, remotely sensed lake trophic state, 1984-2020

Michael Frederick Meyer, Simon Topp, Tyler V King, et al.

Published: 2023-05-10
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Lake trophic state is a key ecosystem property that integrates a lake’s physical, chemical, and biological processes. Despite the importance of trophic state as a gauge of lake water quality, standardized and machine-readable observations are uncommon. Remote sensing presents an opportunity to detect and analyze lake trophic state with reproducible, robust methods across time and space. We used [...]

The unknown fate of macroplastic in mountain rivers

Maciej Liro, Tim van Emmerik, Anna Zielonka, et al.

Published: 2022-11-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management

Mountain rivers are typically seen as relatively pristine ecosystems, supporting numerous goods (e.g., water resources) for human populations living not only in the mountain regions but also downstream from them. Recent evidence suggests, however, that mountain river valleys in populated areas can be substantially polluted by macroplastic (plastic item > 5 mm). It is, however, unknown how [...]

Trait-based modeling revealed higher microbial diversity leads to greater ecological resilience in response to an ecosystem disturbance

Jiaze Wang, Victoria J. Coles, Michael R. Stukel, et al.

Published: 2022-10-14
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Microbiology, Oceanography, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

To quantitatively understand the ecological resilience of an ecosystem with specialized habitats, we focused on deep-sea microbial communities and simulated the response of diverse microbes in specialized habitats to a pulse ecosystem disturbance - the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Two microbial communities with equivalent metabolic libraries were acclimated to the presence [...]

Influence of macrophytes on stratification and dissolved oxygen dynamics in ponds

Ellen Amara Albright, Robert Ladwig, Grace Marie Wilkinson

Published: 2022-09-23
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Hydrology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

1. Small waterbodies are sensitive to stressors such as nutrient enrichment and heatwaves. However, when present, macrophytes may mediate these compounding stressors through their influence on water column thermal structure. Canopy-forming macrophyte beds can induce thermal stratification, which may limit the depth and degree of water column warming during heatwaves. 2. We leveraged an ecosystem [...]

Microcystin as a Biogeochemical Cycle: pools, fluxes, and fates of the cyanotoxin in aquatic ecosystems

Quin Shingai, Grace Marie Wilkinson

Published: 2022-06-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Microcystin poses a serious threat to aquatic ecosystems and human health. There is a pressing need to understand the production, movement, and storage of microcystin in lakes. We constructed a conceptual biogeochemical model for microcystin through a comprehensive literature synthesis, identifying four major pools and nine major fluxes in lakes that also connect to the terrestrial environment. [...]

Experimental evaluation of the effects of bigmouth buffalo (Ictiobus cyprinellus) density on shallow lake ecosystems

Grace Marie Wilkinson, Tyler James Butts, Elena Sandry, et al.

Published: 2022-05-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Bigmouth buffalo (Ictiobus cyprinellus) is a large-bodied planktivore inhabiting shallow waterways in North America and subjected to unregulated harvest throughout much of their native range. Despite high harvest pressure on some populations, we know little about the ecosystem-level effects of lowering bigmouth buffalo densities. To evaluate the effect of bigmouth buffalo density on lower trophic [...]

GEDI Launches a New Era of Biomass Inference from Space

Ralph Dubayah, John Armston, Sean Healey, et al.

Published: 2022-04-20
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Accurate estimation of aboveground forest biomass stocks is required to assess the impacts of land use changes such as deforestation and subsequent regrowth on concentrations of atmospheric CO2. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) is a lidar mission launched by NASA to the International Space Station in 2018. GEDI was specifically designed to retrieve vegetation structure within a [...]

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