Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Comment on Evaristo & McDonnell, Global analysis of streamflow response to forest management
Published: 2019-07-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Forests play a key role in the water cycle, so both planting and removing forests can affect streamflow. In a recent Nature article1, Evaristo and McDonnell used a gradient-boosted-tree model to conclude that streamflow response to forest removal is predominantly controlled by the potential water storage in the landscape, and that removing the worlds forests would contribute an additional 34,098 [...]
A practical approach for estimating the escape ratio of near-infrared solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence
Published: 2019-07-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physiology, Plant Sciences
Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) has emerged as a leading approach for remote sensing of gross primary productivity (GPP). While SIF has an intrinsic, underlying relationship with canopy light capture and light use efficiency, these physiological relationships are obscured by the fact that satellites observe a small and variable fraction of total emitted canopy SIF. Upon emission, [...]
The Baltic TRANSCOAST approach – investigating shallow coasts as terrestrial-marine interface of water and matter fluxes
Published: 2019-07-17
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Biology, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Plant Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Soil Science
In Baltic TRANSCOAST we study the physical, biogeochemical, and biological processes at the land-ocean interface. The coastal zone is heavily impacted by various human activities as well as by geomorphological and climatic processes – on both the land and the sea side. Land-sea interactions at low lying coastal areas that are often dominated by peatlands, and are a common feature along the Baltic [...]
Neoglacial trends in diatom dynamics from a small alpine lake in the Qinling Mountains of central China
Published: 2019-07-05
Subjects: Geography, Life Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
During the latter stages of the Holocene, and prior to anthropogenic global warming, the Earth underwent a period of cooling called the neoglacial. The neoglacial was associated with declining summer insolation and changes to Earth surface albedo. Although impacts varied globally, in China the neoglacial was generally associated with cooler, more arid climate, which led to renewed permafrost [...]
Information-theoretic Portfolio Decision Model for Optimal Flood Management
Published: 2019-06-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computational Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability, Sustainability, Systems Engineering, Water Resource Management
The increasing impact of flooding urges more effective flood management strategies to guarantee sustainable ecosystem development. Recent catastrophes underline the importance of avoiding local flood management, but characterizing large scale basin wide approaches for systemic flood risk management. Here we introduce an information-theoretic Portfolio Decision Model (iPDM) for the optimization of [...]
Decentralized Flood Forecasting Using Deep Neural Networks
Published: 2019-06-22
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Predicting flood for any location at times of extreme storms is a longstanding problem that has utmost importance in emergency management. Conventional methods that aim to predict water levels in streams use advanced hydrological models still lack of giving accurate forecasts everywhere. This study aims to explore artificial deep neural networks performance on flood prediction. While providing [...]
Probing the chemical transformation of seawater-soluble crude oil components during microbial oxidation
Published: 2019-06-18
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Studies assessing the environmental impacts of oil spills focus primarily on the non-water-soluble components, leaving the fate of the water-soluble fraction (WSF) largely unexplored. We employed untargeted chemical analysis along with biological information to probe the transformation of crude oil WSF in seawater, in the absence of light, in a laboratory experiment. Over a 14-day incubation, [...]
High temporal resolution of leaf area data improves empirical estimation of grain yield
Published: 2019-05-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Life Sciences
Empirical yield estimation from satellite data has long lacked suitable combinations of spatial and temporal resolutions. Consequently, the selection of metrics, i.e., temporal descriptors that predict grain yield, has likely been driven by practicality and data availability rather than by systematic targetting of critically sensitive periods as suggested by knowledge of crop physiology. The [...]
Dark carbon fixation contributes to sedimentary organic carbon in the Arabian Sea oxygen minimum zone
Published: 2019-05-18
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In response to rising CO2 concentrations and increasing global sea surface temperatures, oxygen minimum zones (OMZ), or “dead zones”, are expected to expand. OMZs are fueled by high primary productivity, resulting in enhanced biological oxygen demand at depth, subsequent oxygen depletion, and attenuation of remineralization. This results in the deposition of organic carbon-rich sediments. Carbon [...]
Representation of European hydroclimatic patterns with Self-Organizing Maps
Published: 2019-05-15
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Planetary Sciences
Self-Organizing Maps provide a powerful, non-linear technique of dimensionality reduction that can be used to identify clusters with similar attributes. Here, they were constructed from a 1000-year-long gridded palaeoclimatic dataset, namely the Old World Drought Atlas, to detect regions of homogeneous hydroclimatic variability across the European continent. A classification scheme of 10 regions [...]
Mechanisms of fault mirror formation and fault healing in carbonate rocks
Published: 2019-05-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Life Sciences, Mineral Physics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The development of smooth, mirror-like surfaces provides insight into the mechanical behaviour of crustal faults during the seismic cycle. To determine the thermo-chemical mechanisms of fault mirror formation, we investigated carbonate fault systems in seismically active areas of central Greece. Using multi-scale electron microscopy combined with Raman and electron energy loss spectroscopy, we [...]
Using a Superconducting Gravimeter in Support of Absolute Gravity Campaigning — A feasibility study
Published: 2019-05-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Life Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Preparing for joint analysis of absolute gravity (AG) campaigns, this report investigates whether a stationary superconducting gravimeter (SCG) can provide a long-term stable measurement of site-dependent perturbations that help in reduction to the local value of little-$g$ and its secular rate of change. The crucial element concerns the discrimination of instrumental drift components from trends [...]
Trends of hydroclimatic intensity in Colombia
Published: 2019-05-08
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability, Water Resource Management
Prediction of changes in precipitation in upcoming years and decades caused by global climate change associated with the greenhouse effect, deforestation and other anthropic perturbations is a practical and scientific problem of high complexity and huge consequences. To advance toward this challenge we look at the daily historical record of all available rain gauges in Colombia to estimate an [...]
Paleogeographic and Morphologic Reconstroction of a Buried Monogenetic Volcanic Field
Published: 2019-05-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Technological advances of our modern society motivated an unprecedented necessity to find natural resources in the subsurface of our planet. The search for these valuable resources has revealed an unexpected number of ancient volcanoes buried and preserved within sedimentary basins globally. Continuous improvements in remote sensing techniques such as seismic reflection can provide a valid [...]
What has Global Sensitivity Analysis ever done for us? A systematic review to support scientific advancement and to inform policy-making in earth system modelling
Published: 2019-04-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Mathematics, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Computer models are essential tools in the earth system sciences. They underpin our search for understanding of earth system functioning and support decision- and policy-making across spatial and temporal scales. To understand the implications of uncertainty and environmental variability on the identification of such earth system models and their predictions, we can rely on increasingly powerful [...]