Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Transdisciplinary doctoral training to address global sustainability challenges
Published: 2023-12-14
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Methods for assessing Giant Kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) biomass sinking rates and decomposition for carbon dioxide removal applications
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
One promising carbon dioxide removal (CDR) strategy to achieve negative emissions of carbon dioxide is the sinking of farmed seaweed into the ocean where it may be sequestered. Methods to quantify the sinking rates, degradation rates and the release of degradation products from kelp is fundamental to understanding the durability of the strategy if applied to scale. The aim of this white paper is [...]
Stromatoporoids and extinctions
Published: 2023-12-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Stromatoporoids are common shallow marine hypercalcified sponges in two major episodes with distinctive skeletal architectures: 1) Palaeozoic: Early to Middle Ordovician, to Late Devonian; and 2) Mesozoic: Late Triassic to Cretaceous and rare Cenozoic, but not confirmed in Permian and earlier Triassic strata. Stromatoporoids appeared in Early to Middle Ordovician strata, important in buildups [...]
Advancing hydrological monitoring using image-based techniques: challenges and opportunities
Published: 2023-11-17
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
Enhanced and effective hydrological monitoring plays a crucial role in understanding water-related processes in a rapidly changing world. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities associated with image-based hydrological monitoring techniques, and highlights the need for innovative approaches and technologies to overcome existing limitations. Image-based hydrological monitoring has [...]
Köppen Geiger climatic classification for R users.
Published: 2023-11-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Here we introduce an R version of the Matlab function from Beck et al. (2018), designed to classify monthly temperature and precipitation data according to Köppen Geiger climate classification. As professionals working in Macroecology or Biogeography usually use R as their main programming language, we believe this will be extremely useful for the work of these scientific communities.
Wildfire smoke impacts lake ecosystems
Published: 2023-11-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Wildfire activity is increasing globally. The resulting smoke plumes can travel hundreds to thousands of kilometers, reflecting or scattering sunlight and depositing ash within ecosystems. Several key physical, chemical, and biological processes in lakes are controlled by factors affected by smoke. The spatial and temporal scales of lake exposure to smoke are extensive and underrecognized. We [...]
Understanding the role of biodiversity in the climate, food, water, energy, transport and health nexus in Europe
Published: 2023-11-04
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Biodiversity underpins the functioning of ecosystems and the diverse benefits that nature provides to people, yet is being lost at an unprecedented rate. To halt or reverse biodiversity loss, it is critical to understand the complex interdependencies between biodiversity and key drivers and sectors to inform the development of holistic policies and action. We conducted a literature review on the [...]
Harnessing the Power of Rhizosphere Bacteria for Pollution Remediation: Strategies, Mechanisms, and Environmental Impact: A Minireview
Published: 2023-10-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
This present review provides an in-depth exploration of the burgeoning potential of rhizosphere bacteria as a formidable tool for pollution remediation within the context of contemporary scientific understanding. The rhizosphere, a soil region intimately associated with plant roots, encompasses a dynamic and diverse bacterial community renowned for its distinctive capabilities in mitigating a [...]
Clarifying the trophic state concept to advance freshwater science, management, and interdisciplinary collaboration across spatial and temporal scales
Published: 2023-10-03
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
For over a century, ecologists have used the concept of trophic state (TS) to characterize an aquatic ecosystem’s biological productivity. Because measuring productivity can be challenging within an ecosystem and across landscapes, multiple TS classification schemes, each relying on a variety of proxies for productivity, have emerged to meet use-specific needs. Most commonly, chlorophyll a, [...]
Benthic habitat mapping: A review of three decades of mapping biological patterns on the seafloor
Published: 2023-09-26
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
What is benthic habitat mapping, how is it accomplished, and how has that changed over time? We query the published literature to answer these questions and synthesize the results quantitatively to provide a comprehensive review of the field over the past three decades. Categories of benthic habitat maps are differentiated unambiguously by the response variable (i.e., the subject being mapped) [...]
Chapter 4. Bacterial and archaeal DNA from lake sediments
Published: 2023-09-22
Subjects: Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
General microbial patterns of biogeography can be established based on sedimentary DNA (sedDNA) retrieved from diverse inland aquatic ecosystems, provided that certain variable environmental factors are taken into consideration in order to trace the admixture of prokaryotic sedDNA preserved in lacustrine sediments from source to sink. These include several watershed characteristics, such as [...]
Understanding Europe’s forest harvesting regimes
Published: 2023-08-31
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations
The functioning and structure of most European forests are actively shaped by intensive human use. Harvesting of wood is one of the key processes of forest management, making it a crucial element to include in any large-scale analysis of forest ecosystems. Yet, our understanding of how forests are harvested across Europe is limited, as the true harvest regimes – a realisation of decisions made by [...]
Independent estimates of net carbon uptake in croplands: UAV-LiDAR and machine learning vs. eddy-covariance
Published: 2023-08-30
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding sequestration of organic carbon (C) in agroecosystems is of primary importance for greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting in managed ecosystems, reducing the environmental footprint of land use, and inform crediting programs. However, a broader application of precise C accounting is currently constrained by a limited number of direct flux measurements. Aside well-studied ecosystems via [...]
Beyond microbial carbon use efficiency
Published: 2023-08-16
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) is defined as the proportion of microbial biomass growth C versus substrate C uptake, and thus provides a useful measure of microbially driven accumulation and loss of soil organic carbon (SOC) 1. In a recent study published in Nature 2, the authors use a data-driven machine learning approach to conclude that CUE promotes global SOC storage based on a [...]
New Ediacaran biota from the oldest Nama Group, Namibia (Tsaus Mountains), and re-definition of the Nama Assemblage
Published: 2023-08-07
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Nama Group, Namibia (≥550.5 to <538 million years ago, Ma) preserves one of the most diverse metazoan fossil records of the terminal Ediacaran Period. We report numerous features that may be biological in origin from the shallow marine, siliciclastic, lowermost Mara Member (older than ca. 550.5 Ma) from the Tsaus Mountains. These include forms that potentially represent body fossils, [...]