Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
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 shapes and sizes of macroplastics and other litter 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 [...]
Natural Philosophy of Protoplanetary and Planetary Discs: On the Origin and Evolution of Life
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
This paper examines the four pivotal and most contentious issues within the field of abiogenesis by analyzing the life-originating processes centred on protoplanetary and planetary discs. These include: 1. Geological environment; 2. Source of nutrients/initial molecules; 3. Source of energy; 4. RNA world versus metabolic world: which came first? To date, scientists have been unable to reach a [...]
Finding Inter-species Associations on Large Citizen Science Datasets
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Determining associations among different species from citizen science databases is challenging due to observer behavior and intrinsic density variations that give rise to correlations that do not imply species associations. This paper introduces a method that can efficiently analyze large datasets to extract likely species associations. It tiles space into small blocks chosen to be of the [...]
Relationships between water quality, stream metabolism, and water stargrass growth in the lower Yakima River, 2018 to 2020
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Since the early 2000s, water clarity on the lower Yakima River has improved. Changes in best management practices combined with a total maximum daily load for suspended sediment led to these improved conditions. As water clarity improved, so did conditions for aquatic plants; the clearer the water, the better the light penetration, and dramatic increases in plant biomass were observed. In the [...]
Altitudinal and Seasonal Assessment of Precipitation Chemistry and Wet Deposition in the Vaz Research Forest, Northern Iran
Published: 2025-08-14
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
This study examines the chemical composition of precipitation across altitudinal gradients in the Vaz Research Forest, northern Iran, from 1999 to 2003. Precipitation samples were collected at 300, 1000, 1600, and 2200 m above sea level. Concentrations of nitrate (NO₃⁻), sulfate (SO₄²⁻), chloride (Cl⁻), ammonium (NH₄⁺), calcium (Ca²⁺), and magnesium (Mg²⁺) and their wet deposition values were [...]
Long-term trends and drivers of water color in Missouri reservoirs
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Contrasting water quality trends are occurring within and across North America, with waterbodies experiencing increasing phytoplankton blooms, increasing dissolved organic matter, or both, while others are becoming clearer and bluer; dramatically changing water color. To assess the spatial and temporal variability in water color, we quantified trends in satellite-derived dominant wavelength (λd) [...]
Virunga Volcanoes Supersite Biennial Report: 2017- 2019
Published: 2025-08-09
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Virunga Volcanoes is the first Supersite established on the African continent in a highly populated Multi-hazards region. This permanent Supersite was established in a critical context as little was known about the Virunga hazards sources and their dynamics, and little done as measures to evaluate, mitigate and reduce their impacts. Similarly, the active volcanoes are poorly studied and [...]
22 Years Later: Evaluating Glover & Smith’s 2003 Predictions of the 2025 Deep-Sea Ecosystem
Published: 2025-08-08
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Earth’s deep-sea ecosystem remains one of the least explored and understood ecosystems on the planet. Human interest in the resources available in the deep-sea must be balanced with potential harm to the deep-sea ecosystem. Accurately predicting the effect on human impact on the deep-sea floor can help guide policies and actions today. This research evaluates prior predictions of human impact on [...]
Bridging Ancestral Knowledge and Ecosystem Science for Coastal Restoration in Latin America
Published: 2025-08-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Systems Biology
Peer-review status: This manuscript has not been peer-reviewed. It is a preprint submitted for public dissemination and open feedback. This study documents the CALISUR methodology, a community-based mangrove restoration model rooted in ancestral ecological knowledge and applied across six intervention sites in the Gulf of Guayaquil. The methodology integrates scientific and traditional practices [...]