Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Soil-informed multivariate decision support to assess urban ecosystem service potential
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Applied Mathematics, Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Dynamical Systems, Multivariate Analysis, Natural Resources and Conservation, Remote Sensing, Soil Science, Spatial Science, Sustainability, Theory and Algorithms
Metropolitan expansion across Africa requires robust soil information to support ecosystem services and urban resilience. However, digital soil mapping often prioritises predictive accuracy over identifying where information is reliable for decision making. This study evaluated numerical and South African Soil Taxonomy within a decision framework to assess where ecosystem service inferences can [...]
Knowledge for ambitious, integrated, value-explicit and just collective actions towards global biodiversity targets
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Nature and Society Relations
Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) agreed upon goals and targets for biodiversity in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The success of the GBF depends on the collective actions of the Parties, i.e. member states, to the CBD. Essential challenges in this context include ensuring that efforts across Parties are sufficient to collectively meet global [...]
From geochemical to biogeochemical cycles: an organizational view of how (and why) life shaped its conditions of existence
Published: 2026-04-08
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Life Sciences
Since the seminal work of Maturana and Varela, the Organizational Approach (OA) has defended an organism-centered view of life. This paper argues that the OA must be extended to include the historical, ecological and geochemical processes that sustain biological systems across scales. We develop a multiscale account of closure of constraints (CoC) in which localized closures can emerge and [...]
Injecting vegetation-based spatialization in the hydrogeological framework for erosion modelling
Published: 2026-03-31
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
Erosion processes and landslide are widespread across Italy and frequently cause significant damage to people, infrastructure, and ecosystems. These processes are primarily triggered by rainfall events, whose impact depends on multiple interacting factors, including geomorphology, soil properties, land use, and vegetation. Among these, vegetation plays an essential role in regulating hillslope [...]
A metadata schema for documenting material samples from multiple domains
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Library and Information Science
This paper documents a metadata schema, implementation, and associated vocabularies developed for the Internet of Samples (iSamples) project to integrate geoscience, archaeology/anthropology, biology and genomics sample descriptions in a single cross-domain catalog. To develop the sample description scheme for sample discovery across these disparate domains, we reviewed the metadata schema and [...]
What Companies Say vs. What Matters: LLM Analysis of Biodiversity Disclosures in Oil and Gas
Published: 2026-01-31
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
The power system ecosystem encompasses infrastructure intensive industries such as electric utilities, hydropower operators, oil and gas producers, and mining companies supplying critical minerals. These industries share a common challenge: their physical assets interact extensively with natural ecosystems, creating dependencies and impacts that increasingly draw investor and stakeholder [...]
Global Environmental Benefits of Plant-Based Diets: A Multi-Regional Input Output Analysis
Published: 2026-01-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Food Science, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Sustainability
The global food system, especially animal husbandry, is a major driver of negative environmental impacts. This paper investigates the potential of adopting more plant-based diets (vegan, vegetarian, no beef) to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, land use and related biodiversity loss, and water stress within global food supply chains. This is achieved by combining Multi-regional Input Output [...]
Coral reef commitments are largely absent from national biodiversity and climate frameworks
Published: 2025-11-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Climate, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oceanography, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Sustainability
Global agreements under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) call for integrated action on biodiversity loss and climate change. Yet national implementation remains poorly understood, even for ecosystems highly vulnerable to warming, such as tropical coral reefs. Bleaching-level heat stress has affected over 85% of global reefs [...]
Beyond the mangroves: a global synthesis of tidal forested wetland types, drivers and future information opportunities
Published: 2025-09-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
There is increasing awareness of the global diversity of tidal forested wetlands (TFWs) and their significance in the provision of ecosystem services. These ecosystems, including mangrove forests, tidal freshwater forested wetlands, supratidal forests and transitional forests together span multiple climatic zones, geomorphic settings, and inundation and salinity regimes. We utilise case studies [...]
Unraveling Southern Ocean Diatom Diversity Across the Eocene/Oligocene Transition
Published: 2025-09-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology
The Eocene-Oligocene transition (EOT) was a critical interval of global cooling and circulation change that reshaped marine ecosystems. However, current knowledge of diatom diversity and community dynamics during this interval relies mainly on biostratigraphic compilations, which largely document common species and thus likely underestimate true diversity. This study provides a more complete [...]
The Permian–Triassic transition in Türkiye: New insights and 3D outcrop models for accessible, reproducible and sustainable fieldwork
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences
The Permian–Triassic transition is characterised by major environmental changes and the largest known mass extinction event in the Phanerozoic. However, successions with a relatively complete sedimentological and palaeontological record across the Permian–Triassic are limited to a few well-known sections. The Antalya and Aladağ Nappes in south-western Türkiye provide extensive outcrops of the [...]
The Grand Challenges of WPI-AIMEC: Executive Summary
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Climate, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Marine Biology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
The ocean has a heat capacity 1,000 times greater than that of the atmosphere and stores 50 times more carbon comparatively, thus, constituting a major sink of anthropogenically released greenhouse gases. Warming effects of human activities on the climate system are now undeniably shown to impact marine life and ecosystems, both directly via warming of the ocean and/or indirectly altering ocean [...]
Bridging Ancestral Knowledge and Ecosystem Science for Coastal Restoration in Latin America
Published: 2025-08-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Systems Biology
Peer-review status: This manuscript has not been peer-reviewed. It is a preprint submitted for public dissemination and open feedback. This study documents the CALISUR methodology, a community-based mangrove restoration model rooted in ancestral ecological knowledge and applied across six intervention sites in the Gulf of Guayaquil. The methodology integrates scientific and traditional practices [...]
From Maps to Mandates: Multitemporal Vegetation Cover Analysis as a Tool to Evaluate Environmental Judicial Decisions
Published: 2025-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Management, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
This study examines the use of multitemporal vegetation cover analysis as a tool to assess the ecological effectiveness of judicial decisions that recognize the rights of nature, using Colombia’s 2016 T-622 decision on the Atrato River as a case study. Using satellite data from MapBiomas and generalized additive models (GAMs), we evaluated changes in ten types of vegetation cover between 2006 and [...]
Predator response diversity to warming enables ecosystem resilience in the Galápagos
Published: 2025-05-29
Subjects: Biodiversity
An important impact of global warming in nature is the decline of ecological functions such as primary production, habitat provision, and carbon sequestration. These functions can be disrupted when the species that perform them are impaired by anthropogenic warming or other stressors. Where there is a diversity of responses to warming among the species filling these roles, the function is more [...]