Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Evolution of desalination research and water production in the Middle East: a five-decade perspective
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
Rapid urbanization and population growth, coupled with depleting groundwater reservoirs, have significantly increased reliance on desalination technologies in the arid Middle East, which accounts for nearly half (46%) of global desalination capacity. This large production volume has raised critical questions on the status of desalination research in this water-stressed region, and on whether it [...]
ESG mapping of the Australian mining sector – The state of play on mobilising spatial datasets for decision making
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
The global energy transition will drive increased demand for a broad range of mined minerals.40 Australia is well positioned to support the global energy transition, given its mature mining sector41 and rich and diverse mineral resources. The potential growth in the mining sector represents an42 economic opportunity, however, navigating the associated environmental, social, and governance43 (ESG) [...]
Impact of data density and endmember definitions on long-term trends in ground cover fractions across European grasslands
Published: 2024-12-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Long-term monitoring of grasslands is pivotal for ensuring continuity of many environmental services and for supporting food security and environmental modelling. Remote sensing provides an irreplaceable source of information for studying changes in grasslands. Specifically, Spectral Mixture Analysis (SMA) allows for quantification of physically meaningful ground cover fractions of grassland [...]
Harmonised airborne laser scanning products can address the limitations of large-scale spaceborne vegetation mapping
Published: 2024-12-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Vegetation structure data are essential for understanding the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems and for informing various science-policy interfaces. Recent years have seen a growing demand for high-resolution data on vegetation structure, driving the prediction of such metrics at fine resolutions (1 m - 30 m) at state, continental, and global scales by combining satellite data with machine [...]
SiCTT.net: Satellite Image Clustering Transpose Transformation Deep neural network for Mixed Pixel Deforestation Analysis in Optical Satellite for Land Use Land Cover Application
Published: 2024-11-15
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences
Deforestation monitoring in Brazil for Land use land cover application is the combination of up-to-date monitoring and accuracy. For detailed observation on time, need a Sentinel-2 multi-spectral satellite imagery which is a combination of multiple bands of different frequency for better analysis. Sentinel-2 Multispectral Images are the combination of high resolution and low-resolution images [...]
Fossil hypercalcified sponges; types, relationships and geological history
Published: 2024-11-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Hypercalcified sponges are poriferans with a calcareous skeleton secreted on and in the soft tissue. Living examples and fossils of some such sponges in Mesozoic and Cenozoic strata contain sponge spicules and can be classified within modern poriferan groups of the Classes Demospongiae and Calcarea, which are otherwise almost entirely soft-bodied. However, other fossil forms, largely Palaeozoic [...]
Unravelling sustainable development at the sub-national scale in India
Published: 2024-11-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
India's diverse socioeconomic landscape and environmental challenges make it a complex case for implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite India's federal structure, comprehensive research on subnational SDG progress is lacking. This study analysed progress, challenges, interlinkages, and spatial disparities in individual and grouped SDGs (environmental, social, and [...]
Unearthed from old soils: New records of Antarctic tardigrades, nematodes, and rotifers in the Prince Charles Mountains based on partial sequences of Cytochrome c oxidase subunit I
Published: 2024-10-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Despite only 0.3% of Antarctica being ice-free, those areas harbor diverse small organisms such as tardigrades, nematodes, and rotifers. The habitats of these cryptic organisms face threats from human activity, climate change, and pollution. Biodiversity surveys are essential for managing their protection and such surveys have been proven well possible in Antarctica using environmental DNA (eDNA) [...]
Measures of deep-time terrestrial net ecosystem productivity and carbon sink function
Published: 2024-10-16
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Indicators of past biological productivity, or ‘palaeoproductivity proxies’, offer ways to indirectly measure Earth’s deep-time ecosystem and carbon cycle functioning. Given that plants have been the principal primary producers on land for hundreds of millions of years, the abundances of fossil plants in the rock record can indicate past changes in net terrestrial ecosystem productivity (NTEP). [...]
Rebuttal of Sweetman, A.K., Smith, A.J., de Jonge, D.S.W. et al. Evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor. Nat. Geosci. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01480-8
Published: 2024-10-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
A rebuttal of this paper was submitted to Nature Geoscience The paper by Sweetman et al. (2024) is criticized for poor-quality lander incubation experiments, leading to faulty oxygen flux measurements. The authors misinterpret results and make unsupported speculations, raising serious concerns about the methodology, data handling, and overall conclusions of the study.
Gridded multi-crop suitability mapping using public domain soil and related thematic data
Published: 2024-10-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Eleventh amendment of Land Act, 1964 (2010) of Nepal bases classification of land for scientific "on, inter alia, the nature and fertility of soil, geographical situation, environment and climate of the country." Current study uses publicly available thematic soil (percentage Nitrogen content and absolute pH value) and elevation layers data, all of which are publicly available, to generate rank [...]
Ecological Ramifications of Phosphate Extraction and Use
Published: 2024-09-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Phosphorus (P) is a finite resource located within certain geologic reserves around the world. Morocco and the Western Sahara together account for roughly 75% of reserves, raising questions of how to more sustainably use this precious resource. Phosphorus is mined from rock and eventually converted into usable fertilizer, which is applied to croplands. This study aims, by adopting a global [...]
The fate of nitrogen in deep magma oceans
Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Nitrogen is important in planetary evolution because it is essential to life and the most abundant element in Earth’s atmosphere. Here, we investigate how core formation affects the distribution of N within accreting terrestrial planets. We conducted laser-heated diamond anvil cell experiments (LH-DAC) over a wide range of high pressure-temperature-compositional (PTX) conditions (38-103 GPa, [...]
Private protected areas exhibit greater bias towards unproductive land compared to public protected areas
Published: 2024-09-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Geography, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Globally, private protected areas (PPAs) have become an important tool for biodiversity conservation. While they are expanding in size and number, there is limited evidence on their potential impact on avoiding biodiversity loss, and how this impact compares to the public protected areas (PAs). The impact of protection is measured as the actual biodiversity outcome within the area protected [...]
Resilient foods for preventing global famine: a review of food supply interventions for global catastrophic food shocks including nuclear winter and infrastructure collapse
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Chemical Engineering, Engineering, Food Science, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Risk Analysis
Global catastrophic threats to the food system upon which human society depends are numerous. A nuclear war or volcanic eruption could collapse agricultural yields by inhibiting crop growth. Nuclear electromagnetic pulses or extreme pandemics could disrupt industry and mass-scale food supply by unprecedented levels. Global food storage is limited. What can be done? This article presents the state [...]