Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Forest Sciences
Translation and commentary on Carl Eduard Ney’s (1893/1894) Ueber die Messung des an den Schäften der Bäume herabfliessenden Regenwassers
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resource Management
Stemflow is now recognized as a hydrologically consequential pathway, yet much of twentieth-century forest hydrology treated it as negligible. This paper revisits a counterpoint, a formal exchange regarding stemflow between Government and Forestry Councilor C.E. Ney and Imperial-Royal Trainee Dr. E. Hoppe at the first Congress of the International Union of Forestry Research Stations (Mariabrunn, [...]
A Photogrammetric Method for Volume Correction of Soil Core Samples
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Forest Sciences
Soil volume is an important reference value that is often determined through standardized sampling cylinders. Methods exist for measuring missing soil volume, but they either modify the sample or are time-consuming. Our new method uses structure-from-motion photogrammetry to create a 2.5D model of the soil-filled sampling cylinders from which the missing volume can be determined. We quantified [...]
Valley forests as ecological bottlenecks: Topography and resource concentration structure herbivore use in the Western Ghats
Published: 2026-06-13
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Large-herbivore distributions in the Western Ghats are often interpreted through the perspective of protected areas, forest loss, and human disturbance. This perspective can undermine the ecological role of valley forests and riparian lowlands in steep, human-modified landscapes. Evidence from Asian elephants and other large herbivores indicates that habitat use is shaped by interacting filters [...]
Deforestation Edge Effects on Soil Moisture Persistence in the Amazon Basin: Observational Evidence for Lateral Hydrological Degradation and Minimum Viable Restoration Scales
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Sciences, Hydrology
Deforestation in the Amazon basin degrades not only the cleared land but also the hydrological function of adjacent intact forest. Here we combine 10 years of SMAP Level 4 root-zone soil moisture (9 km, 2015 to 2024) with Hansen Global Forest Change data (30 m) to quantify how proximity to deforestation edges affects soil moisture persistence in intact forest across the Amazon basin. We classify [...]
Global forest typology at 10-meter resolution for forest and land-use monitoring
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Distinguishing forest types---primary, naturally regenerating, planted, and plantation forests---from agricultural tree crops and other land uses is essential for carbon accounting, biodiversity assessment, conservation planning, and supply-chain regulation. However, no existing global dataset resolves this typology at high spatial resolution. We present the Forest Typology (ForTy) v1 dataset, a [...]
Remote sensing and deep learning for standing dead-tree detection and mapping: A review of advances, challenges, and future directions
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Standing dead trees are visible indicators of recent tree mortality and an important transitional component linking forest disturbance to future lying deadwood, habitat availability, and carbon storage. As drought, insect outbreaks, pathogens, and climate extremes intensify tree mortality worldwide, scalable methods are needed to detect and map standing dead trees consistently across forest [...]
Scale-dependent controls on forest carbon uptake across hydroclimatic extremes
Published: 2026-04-28
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Sciences, Sustainability
Conifer forests span some of the most climatically contrasting environments on Earth, from energy-limited Boreal systems to water-limited semi-arid ecosystems. Whether their carbon uptake is governed by universal drivers or by site-specific boundary conditions remains unresolved. Using more than two decades of eddy-covariance and multi-depth soil moisture measurements from two climatic [...]
Changes in soil moisture availability and water yield in response to longleaf pine restoration in southeast Texas
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Our study, based in Trinity County, Texas, focused on whether strategic management of longleaf pine forest could promote a less water-intensive land cover type. We modeled soil evapotranspiration (ET) by measuring vertically stratified soil moisture (15-120 cm) across five forest monitoring sites, four of which received restoration treatments, and one served as a control. Forest attributes, [...]
No place to hide? Regional resilience and vulnerability to global catastrophic risk
Published: 2026-03-27
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Food Science, Forest Sciences, Geography, Public Health
What places on Earth are most resilient to global catastrophic risk (GCR)? We provide the first study of what locations are more resilient against the impacts of nuclear war, near-Earth objects, large-magnitude volcanic eruptions, large-scale cyberattacks, high altitude electromagnetic pulse, geomagnetic storms and pandemics. This shows there is no place on Earth which is resilient against all [...]
Nationwide deadwood mapping reveals rising mountain forests vulnerability
Published: 2026-03-12
Subjects: Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences
Forest mortality is increasing globally under climate change, making detailed, large-scale monitoring essential for understanding ecosystem responses and guiding adaptive forest management. Here, we present a spatio-temporal assessment of standing deadwood in Switzerland from 2018 to 2023, derived from centimeter-scale high-resolution aerial imagery. We reveal a consistent upslope concentration [...]
Misalignments between national mangrove monitoring capacities and climate policy ambitions
Published: 2025-12-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Ambitious global targets for mangrove conservation have advanced rapidly in recent years, yet the implementation of these commitments depends largely on national monitoring systems and policy processes. Despite widespread reliance on country-reported data for setting and evaluating targets, little is known about how national mangrove statistics are generated or how they interact with climate [...]
Temperate forest floors: Ecosystem hub in transition?
Published: 2025-12-04
Subjects: Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
The forest floor (FF) plays a key role in carbon, nutrient, and water cycling. It is the biologically most active compartment of forest soils, highly responsive to environmental conditions. Yet, its response on currently changing forests is understudied. Here we (1) compile existing knowledge on provision of ecosystem services by the FF, (2) evaluate its vulnerability to environmental change, and [...]
Recent climate change reduced Spanish forests' carbon sink capacity
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Forests play a crucial role as carbon sinks and are central to climate mitigation strategies, yet their long-term reliability in this function is increasingly uncertain under climate change. Using deep learning techniques on a multi-source dataset—combining multi-spectral satellite data, airborne laser scanning, and ground-based measurements—we produced the most up-to-date high-resolution maps of [...]
Spatiotemporal dynamics of air pollution and vegetation health in a rapidly urbanizing city in northeastern Bangladesh
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Geography
Air pollution poses a significant environmental concern and is recognized as the fourth leading risk factor affecting human health. Understanding the levels of air pollution and its relationships with vegetation is crucial for assessing health risks under rapid urbanization. In this study, using the extracted imagery from the Sentinel-5 and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) [...]
Unexpected canopy gain in Earth’s mangrove forests linked to natural expansion and regrowth
Published: 2025-11-01
Subjects: Forest Sciences
Mangroves have disappeared rapidly due to deforestation and sea-level rise but can also recover through natural regrowth and restoration. However, their long-term trajectory in area and canopy cover remains highly uncertain. By developing a global mangrove canopy density dataset, we show that mangrove loss (conversion to other land uses) and degradation (reduction in canopy density) have been [...]