Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
ECOCIDE: Quantifying War-Time Environmental Damage: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Kakhovka Dam Destruction
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, International and Area Studies, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Abstract: International law organisations are actively looking into declaring "ecocide" -- mass environmental destruction -- as a prosecutable international crime and in September 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a proposed amendment to Rome Statute. No consistent, statistically sound method yet has been developed to document such a claim of harm, however, because prior environmental [...]
The Vulnerability Spiral: Compound Climate Risk Across Five Islands
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Hydrology, International and Area Studies, Marine Biology, Natural Resource Economics, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Sustainability
sea level rise stacked on top of degrading natural coastal defenses. That assumption is rarely tested againstindependent, multi temporal evidence, and rarely broken down by ecosystem type, so I tested it directly,across 5 islands spanning 3 ocean basins (Maldives, Lakshadweep, [...]
Testing the Fluorescence Advantage: Solar-Induced Fluorescence as an Early Indicator of Agricultural Drought Stress in Marathwada, Maharashtra
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Drought detection in India, both for official declaration purposes and for triggering payouts under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) crop-insurance scheme, still leans heavily on rainfall-deficit records and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) — two signals that only move once a crop has already begun to visibly suffer. This study asks whether Solar-Induced Fluorescence [...]
Stolen Strata: Quantifying the Anthropogenic Erasure of Kashmir's Karewa Terraces and Its Threat to the Saffron Economy
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Karewa terraces are elevated, flat-topped deposits of intermontane lake-basin age (Pleistocene/Pliocene), and they underlie one of Kashmir's most economically significant agricultural systems — the saffron-growing belt at Pampore. Everyone who follows agriculture in Kashmir already knows these terraces are vanishing under unregulated soil mining and uncontrolled urban expansion; there's ample [...]
The Cotton Line: Testing the Institutional Persistence of an Erased Colonial Land-Tenure Boundary Across Vidarbha's Agrarian and Vegetation Geography
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, International and Area Studies, Statistics and Probability
Are there 150-year-old institutional legacies measurable in the 21st century as a spatial signature, in patterns of vegetation phenology (cotton signatures), agrarian labor structure, land use and land surface temperature? That is the core question this paper addresses and the design is not a 'before'-'after', it's a 'spatial discontinuity' test to see if there is still a measurable gap across an [...]
Incomplete coverage of the state of nature across biodiversity credit methodologies: an assessment using the State of Nature metrics framework
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies
Biodiversity credits are growing rapidly, yet the proliferation of methodologies has raised concerns about their quality and integrity. Because biodiversity cannot be reduced to a single common unit, methodologies differ in their choice of indicators; previous comparative studies, however, have examined only aggregation levels or taxonomic focus, leaving unaddressed how comprehensively [...]
Interdisciplinary large-scale research to advance the science and management of drying river networks facing climate change
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Biodiversity
Drying River Networks (DRNs) are increasingly widespread due to climate change and human pressures, yet their ecological and societal importance has long been underestimated. This paper synthesizes the interdisciplinary outcomes of the DRYvER (Securing Biodiversity, Functional Integrity and Ecosystem Services in Drying River Networks) project, which developed an innovative framework for [...]
Sub-pixel Canopy Phenology reveals divergent Spring transition sequences in Tropical Mixed Deciduous Forest
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences
Vegetation phenology regulates terrestrial carbon uptake and land–atmosphere interactions, and is commonly inferred from satellite-derived vegetation indices such as the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI). However, these observations represent spatially aggregated signals that mask phenological variability among individual tree canopies in [...]
Beyond the elite athlete: coupled climate-related health burdens in trail ultramarathon running
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Public Health, Other Life Sciences
Climate change is simultaneously threatening the physical safety and psychological wellbeing of people who recreate outdoors, and degrading the ecological integrity of the natural environments in which they do so. Understanding who bears the greatest burden, which benefits are lost, and how adaptation strategies may shift rather than resolve risk is one of the defining challenges of planetary [...]
Increasing lithium mining could threaten endemic species in biodiversity hotspots
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Electric vehicles (EVs) are being rapidly deployed as a technological solution to the climate crisis. However, mineral extraction to supply EV battery production can cause serious environmental damage, threatening ecosystems and biodiversity from local to global scales. Lithium, a key EV battery component, is experiencing an enormous mining boom, which could drive species population declines and [...]
Coastal plain retention modulates flashflood chlorophylla anomalies in the Red Sea: a CPRI based multisite analysis
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
The eastern Red Sea coastal margin is among the most oligotrophic large marine ecosystems on Earth, where episodic nutrient pulses from flash floods can transiently fuel phytoplankton blooms. Yet, the extent to which upstream coastal-plain geomorphology modulates the magnitude of these flood-driven chlorophylla (Chla) responses remains poorly quantified. We tested the hypothesis that narrower [...]
Marine Heatwaves Disrupt Phytoplankton Communities Through Trait-dependent Selection
Published: 2026-05-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Climate, Marine Biology
Phytoplankton communities, key regulators of marine ecosystems and the global carbon cycle, are susceptible to sea surface temperature variability, such as marine heatwaves (MHWs). However, their trait-dependent responses and the resulting compositional shifts during MHWs remain poorly understood. Here, using an advanced global ocean–biogeochemical model that resolves 310 phytoplankton trait [...]
Soil-informed multivariate decision support to assess urban ecosystem service potential
Published: 2026-04-18
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: 2026-04-09
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 [...]