Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Settlement and anthropization of the Azores Islands
Published: 2023-04-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
The landscape of the Azores Islands is one of the most deeply transformed among oceanic islands, as most of their original forests have been replaced by other vegetation types introduced from elsewhere. This has been considered a large-scale unintentional ecological and biogeographical experiment on the assembly of island biotas and ecosystems. These transformations are known to have been caused [...]
Mercury methylation in boreal aquatic ecosystems under oxic conditions and climate change: a review
Published: 2023-04-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Methylmercury (MeHg) formation is a concerning environmental issue described in waters and sediments from multiple aquatic ecosystems. The genetic and metabolic bases of mercury (Hg) methylation have been well described in anoxic environments, but a number of factors seem to point towards alternative pathways potentially occurring in pelagic waters under oxic conditions. Boreal aquatic ecosystems [...]
Basin and depositional control on the initiation and development of fluid-escape pipes in the Canterbury Basin, New Zealand.
Published: 2023-04-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
The influence of basin and depositional context on the formation and growth of fluid escape pipes in sedimentary basins is not fully understood. While seismic reflection data is commonly used to study these structures, direct observation and sampling of field analogues of pipes and their related structures are rare. In this study, we investigate the evolution of meter-tall fluid escape pipes [...]
A novel fluoro-electrochemical technique for classifying diverse marine nanophytoplankton
Published: 2023-03-31
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
To broaden our understanding of pelagic ecosystem responses to environmental change, it is essential that we improve the spatio-temporal resolution of in situ monitoring of phytoplankton communities. A key challenge for existing methods is in classifying and quantifying cells within the nanophytoplankton size range (2-20µm). This is particularly difficult when there are similarities in [...]
Rice residue burning trajectories in Eastern India: Current realities, scenarios of change, and implications for air quality
Published: 2023-03-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
In 2019, the Government of India launched the National Clean Air Program (NCAP) to address the pervasive problem of poor air quality and the adverse effect on public health. Coordinated efforts to prevent agricultural burning of crop residues in Northwestern IGP (Indo-Gangetic Plain) have been implemented, but the practice is rapidly expanding into the populous Eastern IGP states, including [...]
Rise and fall of Caribbean mangroves
Published: 2023-03-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangrove forests, which are essential for the maintenance of terrestrial and marine biodiversity on tropical coasts and constitute the main blue-carbon ecosystems for the mitigation of global warming, are among the world’s most threatened ecosystems. Mangrove conservation can greatly benefit from paleoecological and evolutionary studies, as past analogs documenting the responses of these [...]
Geomorphologic Controls on the Evolution of Submarine Channels in the Clifdenian-Tongaporutuan Interval of the Southern Taranaki Basin, offshore New Zealand
Published: 2023-03-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Clifdenian-Tongaporutuan interval in the Southern Taranaki Basin experienced significant turbidity activities during the Middle to Late Miocene leading to formation and burial of several submarine channels. The chronologic evolution of these channels is difficult to prove because of their architectures, repeated cut- and- fill, stacking patterns, erosive nature, and spatial-temporal [...]
LHYMO: a new WFD-compliant multimetric index to assess lake hydromorphology and its application to French lakes
Published: 2023-03-16
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
1. Hydromorphology provides a physical framework for aquatic biocenoses. Its condition directly affects the quality of habitats available for fauna and flora and its assessment is therefore required by the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) to assess the ecological status of lake water bodies. 2. In this study, we developed an index of Lake HYdroMOrphology (LHYMO) to provide a quantitative [...]
Towards robust interdisciplinary modeling of global human-environmental dynamics
Published: 2023-02-20
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Real-world environmental problems are typically vast, urgent, and complex. Confronted with such problems, we are often tempted to act fast by pulling together little bits and pieces from different fields and simply adding these to pre-existing models and frameworks. Seldom, though, do we pause long enough to look whether and for how long those larger structures we build can support reliable [...]
A focus on different types of organic matter particles and their significance in the open ocean carbon cycle
Published: 2023-02-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Marine particles are key to the cycling of major elements on Earth and play an important role in the balance of nutrients in the ocean. Three main categories ofmarine particles link the different parts of the open ocean by shaping carbon distribution: (i) sinking; (ii) suspended, and (iii) ascending. Atmospheric carboncaptured by phytoplankton in the surface water, is partly sequestered by [...]
Clumped isotopes in globally distributed Holocene coccoliths reveal their habitat depth
Published: 2023-02-06
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Reliable temperature reconstructions are necessary to improve climate reconstructions and comparisons with paleoclimate model simulations. Most existing paleotemperature proxies are based on organic and inorganic remains of marine organisms. Despite the evidence that the habitat depth of coccolithophores and other phytoplankton depend on their ability to balance light, nutrients, and grazing [...]
Reading the sediment archive of the Eastern Campeche Bank (southern Gulf of Mexico): From the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact to Loop Current variability
Published: 2023-02-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
This is the first high-resolution seismic study showing how the Chicxulub impact shaped the eastern slope of the Campeche Bank in the south-eastern Gulf of Mexico. The induced shock wave fractured Cretaceous strata causing the collapse of the upper slope and shelf over a length of ca. 200 km. Failed material was either transported downslope or remained in parts on the accommodation space created [...]
Non-perennial stream networks as directed acyclic graphs: The R-package streamDAG
Published: 2023-01-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Many conventional stream network metrics are time-invariant and/or do not consider the importance of individual stream locations to network functionality. As a result, they are not well-suited to non-perennial streams, in which hydrologic status (flowing vs. pooled vs. dry) can vary substantially in space and time. To help address this issue, we consider non-perennial streams as directed acyclic [...]
The Communication Distance of Non-Perennial Streams
Published: 2023-01-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We developed Bayesian statistical approaches to assess non-perennial stream network connectivity. Our new methods allow: 1) consideration of changes to both local (stream segment) and global (stream network) connectivity over time, 2) incorporation of prior information from different data sources, and 3) straightforward computation of the posterior distributions of both active stream length and a [...]
Subsurface geologic, geophysical and chronological data for paleo-hydrologic reconstructions in Danube’s lower floodplain - delta system
Published: 2022-12-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Abstract: Records of paleofloods can be reconstructed from special fluvial sedimentary environments such as oxbows; however, deposits in in such lakes, if they exist at all, are still short, on the order of hundreds of years. Longer sedimentary records need to be developed for evaluating paleo-hydrologic regimes of large rivers transiting from a natural Holocene to Anthropocene. Here we report [...]