Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Nanogeios Nanoliquid CO₂ – Performance Evaluation of Hybrid Nanofluid-Enhanced Liquid CO₂ for Advanced District and Data Center Cooling Applications
Published: 2025-03-23
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Engineering Science and Materials, Mechanical Engineering, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Other Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of a novel hybrid nanofluid-enhanced liquid CO₂, engineered to address cooling challenges in water-scarce environments. Developed by NanoGEIOS, the fluid combines graphene oxide (GO) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in a 1:1 ratio (2 vol%) and is optimized using AI-powered NanoFusion dispersion technology. The nanofluid exhibits a 77% increase in thermal [...]
2027: Waking the AKU-- A Cosmic Hyperobject View of the Ancient Giant Palm Forest on Rapa Nui
Published: 2025-01-06
Subjects: Astrophysics and Astronomy, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Other Astrophysics and Astronomy, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Plant Sciences, The Sun and the Solar System
Can a repeating climate event be termed as a cosmic hyperobject? Even if it is dynamically changing within hundreds of thousands of years? At the center of this paper is the science: observable data, 15,000 years of climate change on Rapa Nui. Reaching into the past however we begin with a much broader mathematical view from the eyes of Milankovitch theories of the cosmos that stretches a million [...]
AI-Driven Decision-Making for Water Resources Planning and Hazard Mitigation Using Automated Multi Agents
Published: 2024-12-27
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Computational Engineering, Computer and Systems Architecture, Computer Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Education, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering, Higher Education, Hydraulic Engineering, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Risk Analysis, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Systems Engineering, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Transportation Engineering
This project simulates the Multi-Hazard Tournament (MHT) framework, a decision support system designed for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, using AI agents to enhance decisionmaking processes for flood mitigation and water resource management. The objective of the framework is to develop optimal strategies for protecting water resources, habitats, and communities within a defined budget. The [...]
Bioenergetic modeling reveals opposing effects of ocean and terrestrial warming of an intertidal crustacean
Published: 2024-11-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Organism-level bioenergetics models (OBMs) are an emerging tool for predicting consequences of climate change on organism growth in ecological systems. Global changes in ocean and atmospheric temperature may affect organisms that experience both environments, such as those living in intertidal systems. The acorn barnacle, Balanus glandula, is prevalent throughout the intertidal zone in the [...]
Unravelling sustainable development at the sub-national scale in India
Published: 2024-11-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
India's diverse socioeconomic landscape and environmental challenges make it a complex case for implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite India's federal structure, comprehensive research on subnational SDG progress is lacking. This study analysed progress, challenges, interlinkages, and spatial disparities in individual and grouped SDGs (environmental, social, and [...]
Private protected areas exhibit greater bias towards unproductive land compared to public protected areas
Published: 2024-09-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Geography, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Globally, private protected areas (PPAs) have become an important tool for biodiversity conservation. While they are expanding in size and number, there is limited evidence on their potential impact on avoiding biodiversity loss, and how this impact compares to the public protected areas (PAs). The impact of protection is measured as the actual biodiversity outcome within the area protected [...]
Opening doors to physical sample tracking and attribution in Earth and environmental sciences
Published: 2024-05-31
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Systems Biology
Physical samples and their associated (meta)data underpin scientific discoveries across disciplines and can enable new science when appropriately archived. However, there are significant gaps in current practices and infrastructure that prevent accurate provenance tracking, reproducibility, and attribution. For most samples, descriptive metadata are often sparse, inaccessible, or absent. Samples [...]
Different model assumptions about plant hydraulics and photosynthetic temperature acclimation yield diverging implications for tropical forest resilience
Published: 2024-04-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Tropical forest photosynthesis can decline at high temperatures due to (1) biochemical responses to increasing temperature and (2) stomatal responses to increasing vapor pressure deficit (VPD), which is associated with increasing temperature. It is challenging to disentangle the influence of these two mechanisms on photosynthesis in observations, because temperature and VPD are tightly correlated [...]
Different growth response of mountain rangeland habitats to annual weather fluctuations
Published: 2024-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
An accurate long-term monitoring of mountain rangelands is of primary importance for biodiversity conservation and sustainability of pastoral land use. In this study, we investigate how the seasonality of growth in nine habitats composing the alpine rangeland ecosystem responds to differences in weather conditions from year to year and how these changes occur along the elevation profile. We apply [...]
CHIRICAHUA Field Report 2021-2023 - Sky Islands and the Desert Southwest An Independent Ecological Study
Published: 2024-02-22
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences
This Chiricahua Field Report is a combination of collected data and field observations that began in November 2021 and continued on until May 2023. The Report is about ecology and connections of life. It contains information on 400+ trees in 10 diverse ecosystems including the Madrean Sky Islands and the Riparian zones of ancient sea valleys in SE Arizona. Recent season changes, warming, fires, [...]
Designing and describing climate change impact attribution studies: a guide to common approaches
Published: 2024-01-06
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Human Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Public Health, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Impact attribution is an emerging transdisciplinary sub-discipline of detection and attribution, focused on the social, economic, and ecological impacts of climate change. Here, we provide an overview of common end-to-end frameworks in impact attribution, focusing on examples relating to the human health impacts of climate change. We propose a typology of study designs based on whether [...]
Ten simple rules to bridge ecology and palaeoecology by publishing outside palaeo-ecological journals
Published: 2023-12-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Due to a specialised methodology, palaeoecology is often regarded as a separate field from ecology even though it is essential to understand long-term ecological processes that have shaped ecosystems that ecologists study and manage. Even though advances in ecological modelling, sample dating, and proxy-based reconstructions have enabled direct comparison of palaeoecological data with [...]
ACCE DTP EDI Report 2023
Published: 2023-11-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Education, Environmental Sciences, Higher Education
Underrepresentation of minoritised and historically disadvantaged groups is prevalent in PhD recruitment, particularly in environmental sciences. The environmental science focussed ‘Adapting to the Challenges of a Changing Environment’ Doctoral Training Partnership (ACCE DTP) was awarded funding from the Natural Environment Research Council for an EDI-centred project. This project aimed to [...]
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 [...]
Spatial standardization of taxon occurrence data—a call to action
Published: 2023-10-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Statistical Methodology
The fossil record is spatiotemporally heterogeneous: taxon occurrence data have patchy spatial distributions, and this patchiness varies through time. Large-scale quantitative paleobiology studies that fail to account for heterogeneous sampling coverage will generate uninformative inferences at best and confidently draw wrong conclusions at worst. Explicitly spatial methods of standardization are [...]