Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
A Sentinel-2 based multi-temporal monitoring framework for wind and bark beetle detection and damage mapping
Published: 2022-11-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
The occurrence of extreme windstorms and increasing heat and drought events induced by climate change leads to coniferous forests showing severe damage and stress and making trees more vulnerable to spruce bark beetle infestations. The combination of abiotic and biotic disturbances in forests can cause drastic environmental and economic losses. The first step for containing such damage is the [...]
The unknown fate of macroplastic in mountain rivers
Published: 2022-11-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Mountain rivers are typically seen as relatively pristine ecosystems, supporting numerous goods (e.g., water resources) for human populations living not only in the mountain regions but also downstream from them. Recent evidence suggests, however, that mountain river valleys in populated areas can be substantially polluted by macroplastic (plastic item > 5 mm). It is, however, unknown how [...]
Gaia: Complex Systems Prediction for Time to Adapt to Climate Shocks
Published: 2022-11-08
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A proposal, called “Gaia”, that life regulates Earth’s climate to its advantage, is partially supported by Earth’s climate history, wherein temperature fluctuations over the past ca. half billion years have mostly been small enough to protect life from extremes of climatic fluctuations, while global temperatures overall cooled during the 3.8 Ga when life was present, in spite of increased solar [...]
Drivers of fire regimes in the Brazilian Amazon from 2011-2020
Published: 2022-10-18
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Over the last decade, carbon emissions due to forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon, linked mainly to logging and wildfires, became larger than carbon emissions due to deforestation. Climatic and ecological processes affect the landscape’s flammability, while socio-economic processes influence the use of fire for deforestation and agricultural land management. However, a comprehensive [...]
Taxon cycles in Neotropical mangroves
Published: 2022-09-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
The concept of taxon cycle involves successive range expansions and contractions over time through which a species can maintain indefinitely its core distribution. Otherwise, it becomes extinct. A typical taxon cycle can be subdivided into four stages: (I) expansion, (II) population differentiation, (III) local extinction and incipient speciation (eventually initiating a new cycle), and (IV) [...]
Eocene/Oligocene global disruption and the revolution of Caribbean mangroves
Published: 2022-09-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
In a recent paper, the author demonstrated that, in contrast with the prevailing view of eventual gradual regional differentiation from a hypothetical Cretaceous pantropical mangrove belt around the Tethys Sea, the Caribbean mangroves originated de novo in the Eocene after the evolutionary appearance of the first mangrove-forming tree species known for the region, the ancestor of the extant [...]
Calling time on alien plantscapes
Published: 2022-09-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Both urban and rural environments around the globe have become dominated by alien plant species to the extent that plantscapes from one region or country have become difficult to distinguish from many others. This process of plant community homogenisation comes at a cost to cultural identity and undermines people’s sense of place. Although invasive alien plant species have received considerable [...]
Calling Time on the Imperial Lawn and the Imperative for Greenhouse Gas Mitigation
Published: 2022-09-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Non-technical summary As green spaces, lawns are often thought to capture carbon from the atmosphere. However, once mowing, fertlising, and irrigation are taken into account, we show that they become carbon sources, at least in the long run. Converting unused urban and rural lawn and grassland to treescapes can make a substantial contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing [...]
A Reproducible and Reusable Pipeline for Segmentation of Geoscientific Imagery
Published: 2022-09-07
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Segmentation of Earth science imagery is an increasingly common task. Among modern techniques that use Deep Learning, the UNet architecture has been shown to be a reliable for segmenting a range of imagery. We developed software - Segmentation Gym - to implement a data-model pipeline for segmentation of scientific imagery using a family of UNet models. With an existing set of imagery and labels, [...]
Characterising Ice Slabs in Firn Using Seismic Full Waveform Inversion
Published: 2022-09-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
The density structure of firn has implications for hydrological and climate modelling, and ice shelf stability. The structure of firn can be evaluated from depth models of seismic velocity, widely obtained with Herglotz-Wiechert Inversion (HWI), an approach that considers the slowness of refracted seismic arrivals. However, HWI is strictly appropriate only for steady-state firn profiles and the [...]
The salmonid and the subsurface: Hillslope storage capacity determines the quality and distribution of fish habitat
Published: 2022-08-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Water in rivers is delivered via the critical zone that mantles landscapes. Consequently, the success of stream-rearing salmonids depends on the structure and resulting water storage and release processes of this zone. Physical processes below the land surface (the subsurface component of the critical zone) ultimately determine how landscapes ‘filter’ climate to manifest ecologically significant [...]
Fog as unconventional water resource: mapping fog occurrence and fog collection potential for food security in Southern Bolivia
Published: 2022-08-22
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
“Valles Cruceños” rural region, Bolivia, is characterized by an intrinsic water scarcity and an increasing pressure for food production by the neighboring and fast-sprawling city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Here, orographic fog is a daily phenomenon occurring all the year round, representing a sustainable water source for improving farmers’ resilience to dry spells and for promoting food security [...]
Consumption Ozone-Depleting Substances Impact in Central American GDAP: An Input Oriented Malmquist DEA Index
Published: 2022-08-15
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This study measures the impact of consumption Ozone-Depleting Substances (ODS) on the Gross Domestic Agricultural Product (GDAP) of the Central American Countries. The methodology used is a non-parametric program under Data Envelopment Analyze (DEA) with the Malmquist indices methods. The DEA methodology permits defining the technology bound or performance. It discomposes the total factor [...]
DNA sequencing, microbial sensors, and the discovery of buried mineral resources
Published: 2022-08-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
New mineral resources are critical to both sustaining human population growth and technological improvements that will enable global decarbonization. New and innovative exploration technologies that enable detection of deeply buried mineralization and host rocks are required to meet these demands. Here we show that DNA amplicon sequencing of soil microbial communities resolves anomalies in [...]
Sampling across large-scale geological gradients to study geosphere-biosphere interactions
Published: 2022-07-25
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Despite being one of the largest microbial ecosystems on Earth, with >1029 microbial cells, many basic open questions remain about how life exists and thrives in the deep subsurface biosphere, inside Earth’s crust. Much of this ambiguity is due to the fact that it is exceedingly difficult and (often prohibitively expensive) to directly sample the deep subsurface, requiring elaborate drilling [...]