Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
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 Data Discovery, Integration, and Credit
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 community practices and infrastructure that currently prevent accurate provenance tracking, reproducibility, and attribution. For the vast majority of samples, descriptive metadata is often sparse, [...]
Different model assumptions about plant hydraulics and photosynthetic temperature acclimation yield diverging implications for tropical forest resilience
Published: 2024-04-05
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: 2023-11-07
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 [...]
Field Report No. 3 - Tabor Tree Project Summary Report 2021
Published: 2023-10-10
Subjects: Adult and Continuing Education, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Outdoor Education, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
“The Friends of Mt. Tabor Park (FMTP) was organized as a non-profit group* in 2000. Our pur- pose is to improve and help maintain Mt. Tabor Park for the benefit of individuals, organizations and the Park Bureau; to identify and help solve problems; and to participate in park planning projects.”(FMTP) During the winter of 2021 with covid closures of the Visitor Center, Tree Medicine hikes were [...]
Field Report No. 2 - Tabor Tree Project: Citizen Scientists Training
Published: 2023-10-10
Subjects: Adult and Continuing Education, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Outdoor Education, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
“NASA’s citizen science projects are collaborations between scientists and interested members of the public. Through these collaborations, volunteers (known as citizen scientists) have helped make thou- sands of important scientific discoveries.” (NASA) In January 2021, using the GLOBE Observer app, the Mt. Tabor community joined this global network of scientists, students, teachers, hikers, and [...]
Field Report No. 1 - Tabor Tree Project Report 2021
Published: 2023-10-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations, Other Plant Sciences
In this Survey, the Tabor Tree Project identified 130 trees randomly in all 12 zones of the park called Mt. Tabor in Portland, Oregon. The Majority of the Trees at Mt. Tabor Park are conifers, and specifically Douglas Fir who can live longer than 1,000 years. The oldest one in the park is 496 years old, and sprouted sometime around 1520 AD. Through the efforts of Tree Medicine hikes and Citizen [...]
Clarifying the trophic state concept to advance freshwater science, management, and interdisciplinary collaboration across spatial and temporal scales
Published: 2023-10-03
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
For over a century, ecologists have used the concept of trophic state (TS) to characterize an aquatic ecosystem’s biological productivity. Because measuring productivity can be challenging within an ecosystem and across landscapes, multiple TS classification schemes, each relying on a variety of proxies for productivity, have emerged to meet use-specific needs. Most commonly, chlorophyll a, [...]