Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Beyond universal access: mapping regional inequalities and spatial coldspots in India’s WaSH sector toward SDG 6
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
National averages can conceal significant sectoral disparities and long-standing subnational injustices, despite the fact that India’s flagship programs had significantly improved access to water and sanitation. This report provided a thorough, data-driven evaluation of the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) in all 37 Indian states and union territories (UTs) using 25 indicators. Pearson’s [...]
Beyond national averages: a multi-method assessment of sub-national environmental sustainability and inequality in India
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
India’s rapid economic growth regularly jeopardizes its environmental foundation, although important sub-national differences were typically hidden by national-level evaluations. For all 37 Indian states and union territories (UTs), this study creates the Composite index of Environmental Sustainability (CoES), a comprehensive multi-dimensional framework that integrates 36 indicators across 4 [...]
Geostatistical Assessment of Shallow Groundwater Risk in Urban Coastal Virginia: A Case Study from Virginia Beach
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
Urban groundwater assessments in coastal cities often rely on public monitoring datasets that are spatially uneven and temporally discontinuous. This study evaluates shallow groundwater risk in Virginia Beach, Virginia, using 30 years of records (1991–2020) from 121 monitoring wells for groundwater levels and 55 wells with groundwater‑quality data for chloride (Cl), iron (Fe), and manganese (Mn). [...]
Paleoarchean seawater and seafloor hydrothermal processes: insights from 3.5 to 3.3 Ga carbonate geochemistry
Published: 2026-04-13
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Carbonates (3.5 to 3.3 Ga) in the East Pilbara Terrane (EPT), Western Australia, including interstitial carbonate between pillow basalts, fracture-filling calcite, sedimentary carbonates and carbonate associated with stromatolites, provide valuable geochemical archives for reconstructing Early Earth environments. This study highlights three key findings: (1) Fracture-filling calcite D-2-W from [...]
Land-use change impacts on multidimensional well-being: insights from tropical forest frontiers in Madagascar, Myanmar and Laos
Published: 2026-04-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Tropical forest frontiers are undergoing rapid land use change due to expanding global demands for agricultural commodities and conservation efforts. These changes profoundly affect the well-being of local populations, yet the pathways linking land use, ecosystem services, and well-being remain underexplored. This study examines these links across three forest frontier landscapes in Madagascar, [...]
Anthropogenic acceleration of the leaky nitrogen cycle across the global land-river continuum
Published: 2026-04-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Lateral nitrogen transfer (LNT) along the land-river continuum plays a critical role in regulating global nitrogen (N) cycling and its feedbacks to climate, yet it remains poorly represented in land surface models. Here, we incorporate LNT into a global land surface model within an Earth System Model framework, enabling a process-based quantification of N transport, transformation, and associated [...]
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 [...]
Closure of Constraints in the Earth System: Biogeochemical Cycles and Planetary-Scale Biological Organisation
Published: 2026-04-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Life Sciences, Systems Biology
The concept of closure of constraints has been developed as a characterization of the distinctive causal regime at work in biological systems. Its extension to ecological systems has been attempted but faces persistent difficulties regarding the individuation of ecosystems and the scope of functional ascription. Meanwhile, the question of the biological character of the Earth system (variously [...]
A snag for nutrient fertilization: decoupled production and export
Published: 2026-03-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Interest in nutrient fertilization waned after inconclusive field experiments, but has resurged. Collating Southern Ocean \textit{in-situ} observations and available fertilization simulations, we find phytoplankton primary production and organic carbon export are uncorrelated in the largest high-nutrient-low-chlorophyll (HNLC) region, while model estimates cast doubt on realistic deployments [...]
SIM4Action: An Interactive Platform for Social-Environmental Systems Mapping and Causal Analysis
Published: 2026-03-25
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Hydraulic Engineering, Life Sciences
SIM4Action is an open-source, browser-based platform for participatory analysis of complex socio-environmental systems through interactive causal network graphs. Existing systems mapping tools require practitioners to combine separate software for map construction, network analysis, and causal simulation; none provides an integrated workflow accessible to non-technical stakeholders. SIM4Action [...]
Benefits of the Sentinel-2 mission triplet constellation in 2025
Published: 2026-03-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
With the first-year extension of Copernicus Sentinel-2A satellite operations nearing its end, an evaluation of its added-value is urgently needed. Here, we show that despite reduced spatio temporal coverage, the additional Sentinel-2A acquisitions in 2025 enhanced the number of usable Sentinel-2 observations over Europe for the March-December period by almost 34%, and at the global scale by more [...]
HIGH-RESOLUTION DIGITAL TERRAIN MODEL FOR THE ITALIAN TERRITORY
Published: 2026-03-12
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Engineering Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Life Sciences, Mining Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Social and Behavioral Sciences
High-resolution digital terrain models are essential for environmental planning and territorial analyses, and provide foundations for geomorphological and hydrological applications, including flood and landslide modelling and geo-hydrological hazard and risk assessments. In Italy, airborne LiDAR surveys have improved the representation of terrain morphology in the last decade, but their coverage [...]
crstools 1.0.0: an R package for cartographic analyses
Published: 2026-03-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Spatial analyses are central to ecological studies, underpinning applications ranging from species distribution modelling to conservation planning and macroecological inference. However, most of these require translating processes occurring on a spherical surface into a planar map, inevitably introducing distortion biases. Projection choice can therefore influence both visual interpretation and [...]
Coral connectivity: Biophysical drivers, key knowledge gaps and emerging empirical advances
Published: 2026-03-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Coral reefs are experiencing widespread decline from climate change and anthropogenic stressors, increasing the need to understand the processes that maintain and replenish coral populations. Connectivity—the exchange of individuals between coral populations—underpins population recovery, yet major uncertainties remain in larval biology and behaviour during dispersal and settlement. This review [...]
Characterization and Meteorological Drivers of Dust Events over California’s Central Valley
Published: 2026-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Dust events in California’s Central Valley pose severe risks to public health, regional air quality, and transportation. Yet, the climatology and meteorological drivers of dust events in the region are poorly characterized due to sparse monitoring and limitations of satellite observations. Using meteorological observations from 15 Automated Surface Observation System stations, we systematically [...]