Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
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 [...]
Accessible Batch Catchment Delineation: A Semi-Automated Workflow for Non-Hydrologists
Published: 2025-12-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Catchment delineation is a prerequisite for hydrological and water-quality analyses but remains a practical barrier for non-hydrologists, particularly when large numbers of sites must be processed. We present here a semi-automated, reproducible workflow for batch catchment delineation using openly available GIS tools. The workflow was developed during delineation of 2,870 monitoring sites [...]
Carbon stock recovery and greenhouse gas shifts following wetland restoration: a global meta-analysis
Published: 2025-12-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Wetland restoration is widely promoted as a complementary nature-based climate solution, but its net carbon and GHG effects across wetland types and interventions remain poorly quantified at the global scale. We address this gap with a global meta-analysis spanning all major wetland types and restoration strategies. We conducted a global meta-analysis of 617 restored-altered pairs from 149 [...]
Marjal dels Moros: a model site for the structural, functional, and socioeconomic assessment of managed Mediterranean marshes
Published: 2025-12-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Coastal wetlands deliver critical ecosystem services but remain highly degraded by anthropogenic and climatic pressures. This study presents an integrated structural, functional, and socio-economic assessment of Marjal dels Moros, a managed Mediterranean brackish marsh in eastern Spain, to evaluate restoration effectiveness and inform climate-based management. Six subsites representing [...]
Comprehensive Assessment of Flood Risk and Community Impact of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations in Iowa
Published: 2025-12-27
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Life Sciences
Flooding presents a significant risk to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), especially in regions increasingly affected by extreme weather events. This study uses advanced geospatial analysis techniques to assess the environmental and economic vulnerabilities of 12,703 CAFOs across Iowa, United States. We focused on the exposure of CAFOS to 100-year and 500-year floodplains, [...]
Explainable Machine Learning for Wheat Biomass Integrating Sentinel-1/2, PlanetScope and In-Situ Weather Data
Published: 2025-12-18
Subjects: Agriculture, Life Sciences
Global food security faces increasing challenges from climate change, making accurate monitoring of essential crops like wheat (Triticum aestivum) critical. This research introduces an explainable machine learning (ML) framework to estimate and forecast wheat above-ground biomass (AGB) in central Chile across the 2020–2023 growing seasons. The study uses a two-stage approach: first, in-season AGB [...]
Misalignments between national mangrove monitoring capacities and climate policy ambitions
Published: 2025-12-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Ambitious global targets for mangrove conservation have advanced rapidly in recent years, yet the implementation of these commitments depends largely on national monitoring systems and policy processes. Despite widespread reliance on country-reported data for setting and evaluating targets, little is known about how national mangrove statistics are generated or how they interact with climate [...]
Directional Centroid Trajectories Reveal Shifting Fire Activity Across Brazilian Biomes
Published: 2025-12-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
We utilized directional centroid trajectories to examine how Brazil’s fire regimes in natural vegetation and anthropogenic land use have spatially reorganized over the last four decades. Annual area-weighted centroids were derived separately for natural and anthropogenic burned patches from the MapBiomas Fire Collection 4 (1985–2024), and their interannual displacements were quantified using [...]
Temperate forest floors: Ecosystem hub in transition?
Published: 2025-12-04
Subjects: Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
The forest floor (FF) plays a key role in carbon, nutrient, and water cycling. It is the biologically most active compartment of forest soils, highly responsive to environmental conditions. Yet, its response on currently changing forests is understudied. Here we (1) compile existing knowledge on provision of ecosystem services by the FF, (2) evaluate its vulnerability to environmental change, and [...]
Latitudinal impacts of Hurricane Lorenzo on North Atlantic physics and biology
Published: 2025-12-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Hurricane Lorenzo was the easternmost Category 5 Atlantic hurricane on record. The impact of this exceptional storm on North Atlantic sea surface temperature, mixed layer depth and chlorophyll-a concentrations is investigated in this study using high-resolution daily interpolated satellite, historical in-situ vertical profiles, and model-derived datasets. Results show that Lorenzo induced strong [...]
Long-term incubations reveal geochemical controls on wood biomass preservation at the anoxic sediment-water interface
Published: 2025-11-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ocean-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR) strategies increasingly consider biomass burial in anoxic marine basins as a pathway for long-term carbon storage. To evaluate its stability and environmental impact, we conducted 14-month bottle incubations testing three configurations of terrestrial wood under anoxic conditions: suspended in the water column, placed on the sediment surface, and buried [...]
Attention-Based Deep Learning for Runoff Forecasting: Evaluating the Temporal Fusion Transformer Against Traditional Machine Learning Models
Published: 2025-11-20
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
Reliable runoff forecasting is critical for water management and flood preparedness in Nepal’s steep, data-scarce catchments. Traditional models such as SWAT provide process insights but demand extensive calibration and detailed inputs often unavailable in such regions. Recent advances in attentionbased deep learning offer new opportunities to capture temporal dependencies with improved [...]
Thermal Power and Climate Change: A Data-Driven Analysis of Cause and Effect, 1800-2100
Published: 2025-11-20
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Since 2020, global politics have shifted sharply to the right—nowhere more visibly than in the United States and Europe. By 2024, this rightward turn in the U.S. culminated in open climate-change denial, the defunding of clean-energy initiatives, and a widespread rejection of scientific evidence. Major domestic and international institutions—NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Weather Bureau, EPA, USDA, FDA, [...]
Integrated Geophysical and Hydrochemical Assessment of Groundwater Salinization in the Western Nile Delta, Egypt
Published: 2025-11-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Life Sciences
A total of integrated geophysical and hydrochemical investigations were conducted to characterize groundwater salinization in the western Nile Delta, Egypt. Twenty-five time-domain electromagnetic (TDEM) soundings and 30 water samples (depths 5–167 m) were used together with borehole logs and temporal comparison to 2012 datasets. One-dimensional TDEM inversion and 3-D resistivity modeling [...]
Coastal Wetland Restoration and Greenhouse Gas Pathways: A Global Meta-Analysis
Published: 2025-11-14
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Coastal wetland restoration is widely promoted as a tool for climate change mitigation, but its effect on the carbon cycle is not well constrained. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of peer-reviewed field studies that directly contrasted restored with altered sites, covering carbon stocks and greenhouse gas fluxes across mangroves, saltmarshes, seagrass meadows, brackish systems, [...]