Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
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 [...]
Middle Miocene (Serravallian) wetland development on the northwest edge of Europe based on palynological analysis of the uppermost Brassington Formation of Derbyshire, United Kingdom
Published: 2022-07-23
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Middle Miocene was a warmer and wetter interval than present-day (Steinthorsdottir et al., 2021). In the UK, the most extensive Middle Miocene deposit is the Serravallian Kenslow Member of the Brassington Formation as exposed at Bees Nest Pit, near Brassington, Derbyshire, UK. While known to contain a diverse palynological and palaeobotanical record, the stratigraphical distribution of these [...]
Discoverability of open data is critical to Earth system science
Published: 2022-06-22
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
There is consensus throughout the Earth system science research community that “open data” is of critical importance. However, discoverability and accessibility are often overlooked, raising the question of how useful archived, but not easily discoverable data are. As part of evaluating databases suitable for our own research data archival, we conducted a data discovery exercise (aggregators and [...]
Microcystin as a Biogeochemical Cycle: pools, fluxes, and fates of the cyanotoxin in aquatic ecosystems
Published: 2022-06-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Microcystin poses a serious threat to aquatic ecosystems and human health. There is a pressing need to understand the production, movement, and storage of microcystin in lakes. We constructed a conceptual biogeochemical model for microcystin through a comprehensive literature synthesis, identifying four major pools and nine major fluxes in lakes that also connect to the terrestrial environment. [...]
Quantifying baseline costs and cataloging potential optimization strategies for kelp aquaculture carbon dioxide removal
Published: 2022-06-17
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
To keep global surface warming below 1.5 °C by 2100, the portfolio of cost-effective CDR technologies must expand. To evaluate the potential of macroalgae CDR, we developed a kelp aquaculture bio-techno-economic model in which large quantities of kelp would be farmed at an offshore site, transported to a deep water "sink site", and then deposited below the sequestration horizon (1,000 m). We [...]
Effect of combined dry-wet irrigation and microbial dynamics on soil nutrient bioavailability
Published: 2022-05-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Alternate wetting-drying (AWD) cultivation with implication on soil microbiome, nutritional dynamics and rice yield during pre-monsoon (boro) and monsoon (aman) season are not well studied. In the present 4-year field study the impact of AWD (in pre-monsoon season) is compared with conventional mode of irrigation (i.e. flooded field in monsoon season). The release of soil nutrients into the [...]