Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Plant Sciences
Plant Breeding Biomolecular Classification in Quantum Bayesianism (QBism) Physics-Informed Neural Network Architecture
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Climate, Other Statistics and Probability, Plant Sciences, Probability, Quantum Physics, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Soil Science, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics, Sustainability, Systems Biology
In this brief communication, biomolecular plant breeding multi-classification inference is discussed when leveraging the advantages of Physics-informed Neural Network (PiNN) architecture. Albeit, the expected utility of Partial Differential Equation (PDE) inspired neural networks resides in its performance under limited data availability; a variety of neural network configurations result from PDE [...]
A Technical Overview of the North Carolina ECONet
Published: 2022-07-20
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Plant Sciences
Regional weather networks–also referred to as mesonets–are imperative for filling in the spatial and temporal data gaps between nationally supported weather stations. The North Carolina Environment and Climate Observing Network (ECONet) fills this regional role; it is a mesoscale network of 44 (as of 2023) automated stations collecting 12 environmental variables every minute across North [...]
Fire-vegetation interactions in Arctic tundra and their spatial variability
Published: 2022-03-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Plant Sciences, Remote Sensing, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Circumpolar tundra has experienced a greater increase in temperatures compared to any other biome, with a magnitude of the increase nearly three times the global average. Widespread shrubification associated with pronounced observed warming is gradually transforming the tundra ecosystem structure and function. This study confirms that a shrub-dominated fire-biomass positive feedback loop is [...]
Airborne laser scanning proxies of canopy light transmission in forests
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Software Engineering, Statistics and Probability
Reliable estimates of canopy light transmission are critical to understanding the structure and function of vegetation communities but are difficult and costly to attain by traditional field inventory methods. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) data uniquely provide multi-angular vertically resolved representation of canopy geometry across large geographic areas. While previous studies have proposed [...]
Bridging knowledge gaps with hybrid machine-learning forest ecosystem models (ML-FEMs): inferential simulation of past understory light regimes
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences
Soil moisture is a key limiting factor of plant productivity in boreal and montane regions, producing additional climate feedbacks through evaporation, regeneration, mortality, and respiration. Understory solar irradiation – the primary driver of surface temperature and evaporative demand – remains poorly represented in vegetation models due to a lack of 3-D canopy geometry. Existing models are [...]
Simulated decline of a northern forest due to anthropogenic controls on the regeneration-mortality balance
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences
The population structure of forests is shaped by balancing the opposing forces of regeneration and mortality, each of which influence C turnover rates and are sensitive to climate. Regeneration underlies the migrational potential of forests to climatic change and remains underserved in modeling studies. Our objective was to test the hypothesis that warming may reduce tree regeneration rates while [...]
Emergence of anthropogenic fire regimes in the southern boreal of Canada
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
While radiative forcing and thus land surface temperatures have been shown to positively correlate with fire severity, precipitation, and lightning strike frequency, the effects of human activity on fire regimes remain difficult to disentangle from geophysical drivers given co-variation between these factors. Here, I analyze fire regimes in the 1919-2012 period across Canada and compare national [...]
Tidal marsh resilience to sea level rise controlled by vertical accretion and landward migration under nature-based human adaptation scenarios
Published: 2021-10-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Geography, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Plant Sciences
Tidal marshes are not only lost to human disturbance but also face the threat of sea level rise (SLR). However, current earth system models used to estimate future changes in wetland extent omit wetland’s real responses to SLR without field observations. We synthesised global data on sediment accretion rate (SAR) and surface elevation change (SEC) for tidal marshes and developed a mathematical [...]
The ‘europium anomaly’ in plants: facts and fiction
Published: 2021-09-08
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Aims Rare earth elements (REEs) and normalized REE patterns determined in plant and soil samples represent powerful tools to trace biogeochemical processes during weathering, soil genesis and processes in the rhizosphere, and thus publications reporting rare earth elements and normalized REE patterns in soil systems and plants are rapidly increasing. Methods A normalized REE pattern allows [...]
Correlative Microscopy: a tool for understanding soil weathering in modern analogues of early terrestrial biospheres
Published: 2021-03-18
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Geology, Paleobiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Sedimentology, Soil Science
Correlative imaging provides a method of investigating complex systems by combining analytical (chemistry) and imaging (tomography) information across dimensions (2D-3D) and scales (centimetres-nanometres). We studied weathering processes in a modern cryptogamic ground cover (CGC) from Iceland, containing early colonizing, and evolutionary ancient, communities of mosses, lichens, fungi, and [...]
NIRvP: a robust structural proxy for sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence and photosynthesis across scales
Published: 2020-12-31
Subjects: Agriculture, Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Plant Sciences
Sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) is a promising new tool for remotely estimating photosynthesis. However, the degree to which incoming sunlight and the structure of the canopy rather than leaf physiology contribute to SIF variations is still not well characterized. Here we demonstrate that the canopy structure-related near-infrared reflectance of vegetation multiplied by incoming [...]
Contributions of paleoecology to Easter Island’s prehistory: a thorough review
Published: 2020-07-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Sustainability
Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is well known for the enigmas surrounding its unique megalithic statues, the moai, and the prehistoric (i.e., pre-European contact) Rapanui society that built them. These enigmas include, among others, the time of the island’s settlement, the geographical origin of the first settlers, the technology associated with moai transportation and emplacement, the occurrence (or [...]
An open, scalable, and flexible framework for automated aerial measurement of field experiments
Published: 2020-05-24
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Unoccupied areal vehicles (UAVs or drones) are increasingly used in field research. Drones capable of routinely and consistently capturing high quality imagery of experimental fields have become relatively inexpensive. However, converting these images into scientifically useable data has become a bottleneck. A number of tools exist to support this workflow, but there is no framework for making [...]
Probabilistic soil moisture dynamics of water- and energy-limited ecosystems
Published: 2020-05-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
This paper presents an extension of the stochastic ecohydrological model for soil moisture dynamics at a point of Rodriguez-Iturbe et al. (1999) and Laio et al. (2001). In the original model, evapotranspiration is a function of soil moisture and vegetation parameters, so that the model is suitable for water-limited environments. Our extension introduces a dependence on maximum evapotranspiration [...]
Lower air pollution during COVID-19 lock-down: improving models and methods estimating ozone impacts on crops (accepted 01.07.2020)
Published: 2020-05-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences
We suggest that the unprecedented and unintended decrease of emissions of air pollutants during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 could lead to declining seasonal ozone concentrations, and positive impacts on crop yields. An initial assessment of the potential effects of COVID-19 emission reductions was made using a set of six scenarios that variously assumed annual European and global emission [...]