Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
A successful approach to mangrove ecosystem restoration in the Mauritanian side of the Senegal River Delta
Published: 2023-04-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
A mangrove ecosystem restoration project was carried for 3 years in the Mauritanian side of the River Senegal Delta where scarce scientific and/or technical references exist on these mangroves located in the northernmost limit on the West African coast. The construction of the Manantali and the Diama dams transformed the once exhuberant delta to an artificial estuary and had dramatically affected [...]
Calling for a National Model Benchmarking Facility
Published: 2023-04-14
Subjects: Biology, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Life Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Systems Biology
The modern world uses predictive computer models for many important purposes, including weather predictions, epidemic management, flood forecasting and warnings, and economic policymaking. We need to know how much we can trust the projections of these models, not only to achieve more accurate projections for systems, but also to undertake scientific learning about systems by incrementally testing [...]
Revisiting the Climate Narrative
Published: 2023-04-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Food Science, Forest Management, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Environmental Sciences, Soil Science, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is chiefly tied to land stewardship. Farmers and loggers have removed the plants that, until the industrial era, kept the soil fungi alive, kept soil emissions nearby by breaking the wind, and soaked those up. The result is plumes of carbon dioxide. Putting plants back in would curb these emissions. Farmers and loggers could address biodiversity loss [...]
Co-production of just nature-based solutions to mitigate the impact of domestic effluents on stream water quality in an informal urbanization in Latin America: Diagnosis and a pilot study
Published: 2023-03-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Nature-based solutions (NbS) are increasingly assessed in sustainable urban projects to improve human welfare and biodiversity. Particularly, the design, implementation and assessment of NbS are in most cases spatial and context-dependent, and just NbS must also be included in the agenda. To this end, alternative paradigms such as transdisciplinary and action research can play a fundamental role [...]
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 [...]
Geosphere and Biosphere coevolution: the role of trace metals availability in the evolution of biogeochemistry
Published: 2022-11-21
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Microbiology, Planetary Sciences
Earth’s geosphere and biosphere have coevolved over time, influencing each other’s stability and keeping our planet habitable for most of its 4.543 billion years of history. Biogeochemical cycles play a key role in controlling this interaction, connecting long-term geological cycles and the much faster evolution of the Earth’s outer biologically dominated envelopes. A small set of [...]
Disentangling the effects of climate change and reoligotrophication on primary production in a large lake
Published: 2022-11-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences
Climate change and reduction in nutrient loads have significant effects on primary production and phytoplankton growth dynamics. Since in the last few decades in many regions, nutrients in lakes were reduced simultaneously as the climate changed. Yet, it remains unclear which of the two has impacted primary production the most. In this study, we couple the General Ocean Turbulence Model with the [...]
Köppen meets Neural Network: Revision of the Köppen Climate Classification by Neural Networks
Published: 2022-08-23
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Categorical Data Analysis, Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Multivariate Analysis
Climate change and development of data-oriented methods are appealing for new climate classification schemes. Based on the most widely used Köppen-Geiger scheme, this article proposes a neural network based climate classification method from a data science perspective. In conventional schemes, empirically handcrafted rules are used to divide climate data into climate types, resulting in certain [...]
Barren ground depressions, natural H2 and orogenic gold deposits: spatial link and geochemical model
Published: 2022-07-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Soil Science
A review of the localities in continental rocks where H2-rich gases have been reported, showed that they are mainly located near gold deposits. Two types of geomorphological features known as markers of gas venting in sedimentary basins were also systematically observed near orogenic gold deposits on satellite images. They consist in both barren ground depressions and high densities of small (< [...]
Microcystin as a Biogeochemical Cycle: pools, fluxes, and fates of the cyanotoxin in aquatic ecosystems
Published: 2022-06-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Microcystin poses a serious threat to aquatic ecosystems and human health. There is a pressing need to understand the production, movement, and storage of microcystin in lakes. We constructed a conceptual biogeochemical model for microcystin through a comprehensive literature synthesis, identifying four major pools and nine major fluxes in lakes that also connect to the terrestrial environment. [...]
Experimental evaluation of the effects of bigmouth buffalo (Ictiobus cyprinellus) density on shallow lake ecosystems
Published: 2022-05-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Bigmouth buffalo (Ictiobus cyprinellus) is a large-bodied planktivore inhabiting shallow waterways in North America and subjected to unregulated harvest throughout much of their native range. Despite high harvest pressure on some populations, we know little about the ecosystem-level effects of lowering bigmouth buffalo densities. To evaluate the effect of bigmouth buffalo density on lower trophic [...]
Differences in running velocity and boldness between male and female Atlantic sand fiddler crab (Leptuca pugilator)
Published: 2022-02-19
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Atlantic sand fiddler crabs (Leptuca pugilator) exhibit an extreme case of sexual dimorphism with the male crabs wielding an enlarged dominate claw that can account up to 40% of an individual’s total body mass. The salt pans found in marine marshes are commonly colonized by fiddler crabs and have limited coverage from avian predators, making the ability to quickly run back their burrows, an [...]
Contribution of zooplankton nutrient recycling and effects on phytoplankton size structure in a hypereutrophic reservoir
Published: 2022-02-17
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Consumer nutrient recycling influences aquatic ecosystem functioning by altering the movement and transformation of nutrients. In hypereutrophic reservoirs, zooplankton nutrient recycling has been considered negligible due to high concentrations of available nutrients. A comparative analysis (Moody and Wilkinson, 2019) found that zooplankton communities in hypereutrophic lakes are dominated by [...]
rassta: Raster-Based Spatial Stratification Algorithms
Published: 2021-11-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Spatial stratification of landscapes allows for the development of efficient sampling surveys, the inclusion of domain knowledge in data-driven modeling frameworks, and the production of information relating the spatial variability of response phenomena to that of landscape processes. This work presents the rassta package as a collection of algorithms dedicated to the spatial stratification of [...]
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 [...]