Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Reconstructing annual 30 m forest aboveground biomass across Southwest China’s karst region from 1986 to 2024
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Fine-resolution reconstruction of multi-decadal forest aboveground biomass (AGB) remains challenging in karst landscapes, where steep terrain, fragmented stands, and strong environmental gradients can limit the regional transferability of national and global products. We developed a regionally adapted two-stage framework to reconstruct annual 30 m forest AGB across Southwest China’s karst region [...]
From Equations to Geospatial Foundation models. What comes next for forest prediction?
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Predicting forest attributes and dynamics has long been a central objective of forestry, yet robust and transferable prediction remains challenging. Forest ecosystems are intrinsically heterogeneous, only partially observable, and shaped by interacting processes operating across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Over the past decades, predictive modelling has expanded across methodological [...]
Ocean warming and acidification alter larval development and swimming behavior in the Atlantic sea scallop, Placopecten magellanicus
Published: 2026-09-10
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Ocean warming (OW) and ocean acidification (OA) are expected to have wide-ranging consequences for populations in marine systems caused by organism-level responses at a range of life history stages, including early larval stages. The Atlantic sea scallop, Placopecten magellanicus, is an economically important bivalve species that may be vulnerable to ocean change, but larval responses remain [...]
From Heat Summation to Climate Adaptation: Lessons from 75 Years of the Winkler Index for Agroclimatic Metric Design
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Agroclimatic indices are foundational tools for matching crop cultivars to suitable climates, yet the accelerating pace of climate change is exposing the limits of indices built on mean conditions. The Winkler Index (WI) is a regional categorization system based on heat summation informed by wines made from grapes throughout California in the 1940s to 1960s, and it remains one of the most widely [...]
A Framework for Experiential Environmental Health Through Theater
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Extreme weather events, including wildfires, are becoming more frequent, intense, and consequential for human health. Scientific advances have improved our ability to characterize hazards and the socioeconomic constraints shaping exposure, but these dimensions are not always integrated throughout the development of environmental health knowledge. Meanwhile, broader publics, although often not [...]
The cost of tree cover loss: quantifying global extinction rates per million hectares
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aim: To quantify the relationship between annual tree cover loss and changes in extinction risk across terrestrial vertebrates, expressing responses as both absolute numbers of species associated with each IUCN threat category per million hectares of tree cover loss and relative odds of assignment to higher-risk categories. Location: Global. Time period: Contemporary period. Major taxa: [...]
A comprehensive evaluation of inland water quality monitoring using the long-term Landsat archive and mixture density networks
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Nutrient enrichment of inland and coastal waters is visible from space. In these regions, chlorophyll a (chl-a), total suspended solids (TSS), and Secchi depth (ZSD) constitute the most commonly targeted water quality parameters. A growing number of studies have shown that, despite not being strictly optically active, total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) can nonetheless be estimated from [...]
Soil Seed Banks of Invasive Plant Species of the Lower Mississippi River Delta
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Corresponding Author Beth A. Middleton; Email: middletonb@usgs.gov This paper this is a non-peer reviewed preprint submitted to EarthArXiv, and is submitted to PLoS One (in review). Abstract The invasion routes of non-native species into estuaries can be difficult to determine. Purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) is an invasive species in North America and occurs sporadically in the remote [...]
The long-term persistence of microbial biospheres introduces a temporal bias into the Drake equation: implications for the search for extraterrestrial life
Published: 2026-09-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Drake equation was designed to estimate the number of communicative technological civilisations, not the prevalence of life. Its lifetime term therefore describes a detectable technological phase that may represent only a small part of a planet’s biological history. This emphasis introduces a temporal bias when Drake-style reasoning is extended from technological civilisations to life more [...]
Assessing the Impact of Invasive Trapa natans on Freshwater Microbial Communities in Collins Lake, New York
Published: 2026-09-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Trapa natans, or water chestnut, is an invasive aquatic plant that disrupts the balance of aquatic ecosystems and upsets the equilibrium of the microbial community it inhabits. This study aims to assess the impacts of water chestnuts on the microbial communities and the overall health of Collins Lake. We hypothesized that the microbial integrity would be different in both the aquatic and benthic [...]
Manufactured vulnerability in the Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna delta: engineered drivers and coastal displacement in south-west Bangladesh
Published: 2026-08-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Risk Analysis, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Displacement from the Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna delta in south-west Bangladesh is usually attributed to sea-level rise, cyclones and salinity. The evidence assembled here points to a jointly produced process, in which hazards act together with engineered landscape change, governance arrangements and the interval households spend unable to return. Peer-reviewed and grey literature for Khulna, [...]
Beyond 2030 Agendas: Toward Conditional Convergence in Global Sustainability Governance
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
As major sustainable-development frameworks approach 2030, “Beyond 2030” conversations are emerging across the UN system. This review synthesizes seven tracks — Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) under the [...]
Species-specific plant water status responses to land surface temperature vary across three cities with different precipitation patterns
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
As urbanization intensifies and global climate warms, people are exposed to high urban temperatures. Mature trees can reduce human exposure to extreme heat; however, urban forests also experience hot temperatures that may affect their physiological function. To investigate how urban heat, specifically land surface temperature (LST), vapor pressure deficit (VPD), and city-level precipitation [...]
phytoclassShiny: a Guided Workflow for Phytoplankton Pigment Chemotaxonomy
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Estimating phytoplankton community structure using diagnostic pigment biomarkers relies on chemotaxonomic tools like CHEMTAX and the mathematical improvements of the phytoclass R package. However, phytoclass requires programming experience that limits its accessibility to non-coders. We present phytoclassShiny, a free, open-source, offline R Shiny application that guides users through a linear, [...]
Wildfire severity reshapes remotely sensed surface temperature and vegetation phenology in a Western Cascades forest ecosystem
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Wildfire reorganizes forests by altering canopy structure, surface energy balance, vegetation activity, and microclimate. However, these effects remain difficult to quantify across seasons, times of day, burn severities, and complex terrain. We used the 2023 Lookout Fire at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Oregon, to test how fire severity altered coupling between surface temperature and [...]