Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
A New Optic on Mangrove Conservation: Blue Nitrogen
Published: 2025-10-27
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Life Sciences
Nitrogen (N) pollution is a primary driver of widespread coastal ecosystem collapse, and mangrove forests represent an undervalued natural mitigation solution for nitrogen removal. Through a comprehensive meta-analysis, we reveal that globally, mangroves remove 870 Gg N annually, which represents only 15% of their theoretical maximum capacity of 5,670 Gg N yr-1. The economic value of this service [...]
Fallowed Heat Island: High surface temperature from fallowed agricultural lands increases nearby water demand and reduces crop yield.
Published: 2025-10-25
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
Agricultural land fallowing is a practice of temporarily idling farmlands to maximize soil water storage, restore plant nutrients, and minimize soil erosion hazards. Despite the benefits of land fallowing, it remains unclear to what extent it affects nearby crop productivity. Here, we show that one such effect is through the fallowed heat island, a concept similar to urban heat island, whereby [...]
Rethinking livestock futures: Integrating climate impacts and genomic technologies into global food security models
Published: 2025-10-23
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
With the projected increase in the global population and food demand on a planet in climate crisis, the debate about the role of livestock continues to intensify. Animals farmed for food are both a victim and a contributor of climate change (CC), with animals suffering from heat stress due to CC but also a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Livestock studies have demonstrated [...]
Reframing natural organic matter research through compositional data analysis
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Compositional data (CoDa) are prevalent in environmental research. They represent parts of a whole, such as percentages, proportions, and relative or absolute abundance. They are arrays of positive data that convey relevant information in the ratios between their components. Standard statistical techniques developed for real random observations often yield spurious results and are therefore [...]
Nutrition in Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenarios: analysis and prevention of malnutrition in low-income regions
Published: 2025-10-12
Subjects: Agriculture, Food Science, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Public Health
Purpose: An abrupt sunlight reduction scenario (ASRS) can be triggered by a nuclear war, a large volcanic eruption, or an asteroid strike, resulting in global agricultural collapse. A wide portfolio of resilient food interventions has been developed to address these issues, but even if they succeed in providing sufficient food energy for the global population, economic inequality could still [...]
Estimating Stability Constants and Entropy for Reactions Between Aqueous Metal Ions and Monovalent Oxygen-Bearing Ligands: Applications to Hydrothermal Metal–Organic Acid Systems
Published: 2025-10-02
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Linear free energy relations were obtained from existing experimental data and used to estimate stability constants for over 16,000 metal complexes with monovalent oxygen-bearing ligands comprising 75 metal species and 220 ligands. Similar relationships for metal-ligand entropy of association were also obtained which facilitate computation of stability constants from 0 to 125°C for over 6000 [...]
Integrating Environmental Variables and Machine Learning for Wildfire Susceptibility Prediction in Portugal
Published: 2025-09-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Wildfires constitute a significant ecological disturbance within Mediterranean ecosystems, exerting profound effects on forest dynamics, biodiversity, and land management practices. The development of precise susceptibility mapping is essential to inform prevention strategies, optimize resource allocation, and promote sustainable forest management by increasing fire pressure. This study employed [...]
Restoration of forestry-drained oligotrophic peatlands can bring climate change mitigation within a few decades
Published: 2025-09-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Introduction: Assessment of climate mitigation of peatland restoration is urgently needed, but data on greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes from restored forestry-drained peatlands (FDP) is sparse. Using surrogate values from pristine peatlands, some studies have indicated long-lasting warming effect of restoration especially of nutrient-poor FDPs, while studies considering realized conditions and data [...]
The Structure, Composition, and Health of Remnant Forest Vegetation of West Timor, Indonesia
Published: 2025-09-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aims: The forest of West Timor has been cleared for different purposes for decades, leaving only small patches of remnant forest vegetation. Understanding tree-shrub composition and structure of this remnant forest vegetation is a vital instrument in assessing the sustainability of forest, species conservation, and management of forest ecosystems. This research was therefore conducted to [...]
Estimation of Land Surface Temperature Using LANDSAT 8 Satellite Data of Panchkula District, Haryana
Published: 2025-09-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Land surface temperature (LST) represents hotness of the surface of the Earth at a particular location. Land surface temperature is useful for meteorological, climatological changes, heat island, agriculture, hydrological processes at local, regional and global scale. Presently many satellite sensor data are available for calculation of land surface temperature like Landsat 8 and MODIS. In the [...]
The sizes and shapes of plastics in rivers
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Limited data exists on physical and geometric properties of river litter. To resolve this, we reveal the physical-structural relationships of river litter, using two of the most comprehensive datasets generated to date. First, we dissect the properties of river litter using a detailed dataset of over 14,000 riverbank items, for which their dimensions (longest L₁, intermediate L₂, shortest L₃) and [...]
Impact of the easternmost category-5 Hurricane Lorenzo on North Atlantic sea surface temperature and chlorophyll-a concentrations
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
A Bayesian Approach to Hyperspectral Leaf Trait Prediction with uncertainty quantification
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Leaf functional traits are leaf features that determine ecosystem functioning, plant growth regulation, and resource allocation. Most of these traits can be effectively derived from leaf reflectance measurements across the visible to shortwave infrared range using various empirical and physical methods. Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR) is a popular empirical approach due to its simplicity [...]
Reconciling remote sensing and reanalysis land surface temperatures: How surface conditions shape bias between GOES-16 and MERRA-2 across the contiguous US
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Hydrology, Life Sciences, Meteorology, Soil Science
Land surface temperature is a key variable governing land–atmosphere energy and water exchanges. Despite its importance, satellite observations and reanalysis products often differ in how they define the effective depth of land surface temperature and in the assumptions underlying their estimates, making comparisons and interpretation challenging. In this study, we present a detailed comparison [...]
Assessment of Natural Gas Pipeline Construction on Stream Temperature and Turbidity in Southwestern Virginia, 2017—25
Published: 2025-09-03
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The natural gas pipeline network in the United States is extensive and often intersects streams and other sensitive habitats, yet there are limited case studies utilizing a comparative upstream-downstream approach to evaluate potential short- and long-term effects of pipeline stream crossing construction from pre-construction to post-site restoration. In 2017, the U.S. Geological Survey, in [...]