Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Natural Resources and Conservation
Temporal monitoring of vast sand mining in NW Turkey: Implications on environmental/social impacts
Published: 2021-01-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sedimentology
Loose sand has a wide variety (over 200) of industrial usage where most of the sand is used in infrastructure. Due to its low cost / high benefit nature and international high demand, worldwide examples of excessive sand mining caused complete destruction of habitats and forcing natives change living practices or even to migrate. Sand mining is one of the most controversial and rapidly growing [...]
A comprehensive study to understand the relationship of urbanization and population density with GRACE ΔTWS for selected study regions in India during 2003-2017
Published: 2020-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Planetary Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
This work investigates the relationship between urbanization, population density and meteorological variables (temperature & precipitation) on groundwater storage in India during the period January'2003 to January'2017. Variations in groundwater storage have been analysed using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) derived variations of Terrestrial Water Storage (TWS). In the first part [...]
Transitioning Machine Learning from Theory to Practice in Natural Resources Management
Published: 2020-10-22
Subjects: Agriculture, Computer Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Water Resource Management
Advances in sensing and computation have accelerated at unprecedented rates and scales, in turn creating new opportunities for natural resources managers to improve adaptive and predictive management practices by coupling large environmental datasets with machine learning (ML). Yet, to date, ML models often remain inaccessible to managers working outside of academic research. To identify [...]
A continental-scale assessment of density, size, distribution, and historical trends of Australian farm dams
Published: 2020-09-01
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Australia is the second driest continent on Earth and freshwater is, therefore, a critical policy concern. Farm dams are ubiquitous and drive AU$17.7 billion of agricultural value, yet there has never been a formal census of Australian dams. In this study, we present a continental-scale assessment on density, distribution, and historical trends of farm dams in each State and Territory of [...]
Comment: The effect of post-conflict transition on deforestation in protected areas in Colombia
Published: 2020-08-20
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A recent study on Colombian protected areas has found an increase in deforestation after ending armed conflict. The authors propose several drivers behind this trend and take their findings as proof of how these drivers specifically affect protected areas and render them particularly vulnerable to deforestation during post-conflict transition. However, after conducting an extended analysis of the [...]
Crop residues are a key feedstock to bioeconomy but available methods for their estimation are highly uncertain
Published: 2020-07-29
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Crop residues are acknowledged as a key biomass resource to feed tomorrow’s sustainable bioeconomy. Yet, the quantification of these residues at large geographical scales is primarily reliant upon generic statistical estimations based on empirical functions linking the residues production to the primary crop yield. These useful yet unquestioned functions are developed either using direct evidence [...]
Overview of recent land cover changes in the biodiversity hotspots
Published: 2020-07-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Biodiversity hotspots are the most biologically rich, yet threatened, terrestrial regions. From 1992 to 2015, they underwent 148 Mha of land cover changes, including forest losses (56 Mha, of which 40 Mha caused by agricultural expansion), declines of shrubland or savannah (23 Mha), and urbanization (10 Mha). The three largest losses in forest areas occurred in Sundaland, Indo-Burma, and [...]
Towards local bioeconomy: A stepwise framework for high-resolution spatial quantification of forestry residues
Published: 2020-07-08
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
In the ambition of a transition from fossil carbon use, forestry residues are attracting considerable attention as a feedstock for the future bioeconomy. However, there is a limited spatially explicit understanding of their availability. Confronted with limited resources for extensive field measurement campaigns, there are also limited discussions on the best practices towards a harmonized [...]
Evaluating single and multi-date Landsat classifications of land-cover in a seasonally dry tropical forest
Published: 2020-05-29
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Accurate information on the land cover is crucial for efficient monitoring and development of environmental studies in the Brazilian Caatinga forest. It is the largest tropical seasonal forest in South America, presenting high biodiversity and is under intense anthropogenic disturbance. Caatingas land cover is heterogeneous, and rainfall is its primary phenological regulator, presenting mainly [...]
Success at the farm-level in payments for ecosystem services: monetary incentives, participatory processes and institutional adaptation all matter
Published: 2020-04-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
While payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes are increasingly common, in most cases, their effectiveness has lagged behind initial expectations. A major debate exists around whether performance can be improved by prioritising project design features that align with the theoretical, economistic model of PES, or whether, where necessary, it is more important for projects to depart from this [...]
Social as much as environmental: the drivers of tree biomass in smallholder forest landscape restoration programmes
Published: 2020-04-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A major challenge for forest landscape restoration initiatives is the lack of quantitative evidence on how social factors drive environmental outcomes. Here we conduct a transdisciplinary quantitative analysis of the environmental and social drivers of tree biomass accumulation across 639 smallholder farms restoring native tree species in Mexico, Uganda and Mozambique. We use environmental and [...]
Saturation excess overland flow accelerates the spread of a generalist soil-borne pathogen
Published: 2020-03-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Plant pathogens are a major agent of disturbance in ecosystems worldwide. Disturbance by disease can alter the hydrological function of affected ecosystems. However, many plant pathogens are also sensitive to soil moisture and can be propagated by the transport of infectious tissue or reproductive structures in surface flow, so that hydrological processes can drive pathogen infection. These [...]
Use of geochemical fingerprints to trace sediment sources in an agriculture catchment of Argentina
Published: 2020-03-04
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Soil erosion and associated sediment redistribution are key environmental problems in Central Argentina. Specific land uses and management practices, such as intensive grazing and crop cultivation, are considered significantly driving and accelerating these processes. This research focuses on the identification of suitable soil tracers from hot spots of land degradation and sediment fate in an [...]
Feedback between drought and deforestation in the Amazon
Published: 2020-01-09
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Deforestation and drought are among the greatest environmental pressures on the Amazon rainforest, possibly destabilizing the forest-climate system. Deforestation in the Amazon reduces rainfall regionally, while this deforestation itself has been reported to be facilitated by droughts. Here we quantify the interactions between drought and deforestation spatially across the Amazon during the early [...]
Lower threshold for marsh drowning suggests loss of microtidal marshes regardless of sediment supply
Published: 2019-10-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Salt marshes are simultaneously among the most valuable and vulnerable ecosystems in the world. We use a simplified formulation for sediment transport across marshes to explain why marshes are most vulnerable to sea level rise (SLR) in microtidal environments. We find inorganic sediment decay length scales with tidal range so that inorganic deposition is very low in the interior of microtidal [...]