Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The Grand Challenges of WPI-AIMEC: Executive Summary
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Climate, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Marine Biology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
The ocean has a heat capacity 1,000 times greater than that of the atmosphere and stores 50 times more carbon comparatively, thus, constituting a major sink of anthropogenically released greenhouse gases. Warming effects of human activities on the climate system are now undeniably shown to impact marine life and ecosystems, both directly via warming of the ocean and/or indirectly altering ocean [...]
Finding Inter-species Associations on Large Citizen Science Datasets
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Determining associations among different species from citizen science databases is challenging due to observer behavior and intrinsic density variations that give rise to correlations that do not imply species associations. This paper introduces a method that can efficiently analyze large datasets to extract likely species associations. It tiles space into small blocks chosen to be of the [...]
The Global Woody Surface: A Planetary Interface for Biodiversity, Ecosystem Function, and Climate
Published: 2025-08-07
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation
Global woody surfaces span an area nearly equivalent to Earth’s terrestrial land surface and mediate CO2 fluxes three times larger than global fossil fuel emissions and methane uptake comparable to the global soil sink, yet remain absent from ecological research and Earth system models despite their critical roles in biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Bridging Ancestral Knowledge and Ecosystem Science for Coastal Restoration in Latin America
Published: 2025-08-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Systems Biology
Peer-review status: This manuscript has not been peer-reviewed. It is a preprint submitted for public dissemination and open feedback. This study documents the CALISUR methodology, a community-based mangrove restoration model rooted in ancestral ecological knowledge and applied across six intervention sites in the Gulf of Guayaquil. The methodology integrates scientific and traditional practices [...]
Conservation is Coherence: Introducing the Negawatt Philosophy of Lawful Design
Published: 2025-07-10
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physics, Other Planetary Sciences, Sustainability, Systems Biology
This paper articulates the Negawatt Philosophy, reframing conservation not as omission or moral restraint, but as the structural intelligence that sustains life and preserves biospheric coherence. Modern economies valorise extraction and combustion while treating conservation as invisible absence. Yet thermodynamics reveals life as negentropy—an ordering that defies the drift into entropy’s [...]
The Mesozoic Conundrum: Global Albedo Factors Resolve the Lack of Correlation Between Temperatures and CO2 Concentrations.
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences
The "Mesozoic Conundrum" refers to the lack of correlation between CO₂ atmospheric concentration and global mean surface temperatures in Mesozoic climate reconstructions (Judd et al., 2024). Here, I show that Mesozoic forest cover, proxied by carbon burial flux (Nelsen et al., 2016), correlates strongly (R²=0.88, p<0.01) with GMST across the Mesozoic (252–66 Ma before present). The analysis [...]
Biorestorer: Synthetic Succession for Soil Restoration in Arid and Degraded Regions
Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Life Sciences
Soil degradation in arid and semi-arid regions poses a critical threat to global ecological stability and food security. This paper introduces Biorestorer, a systems-based framework for initiating synthetic succession and synthetic pedogenesis in highly degraded or sterile substrates where natural recovery is infeasible. The Biorestorer concept integrates dual-temperature biochar, [...]
How to Model Cooling Service Flow of Urban Parks Based on Supply-Flow-Demand Framework? A Case Study of Beijing Olympic Park
Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Rapid urbanization intensifies the urban heat island effect and undermines health for vulnerable communities located beyond the effective cooling reach of large parks. This study introduced a spatially supply-flow-demand framework to quantify the cooling service flow of urban park using Beijing Olympic Park as a case study. Field measurements at representative land types in the park were [...]
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 [...]