Related papers: Sacred Ecology
Vegetation can modify the planetary surface albedo via the Charney mechanism, as plants are usually darker than the bare surface of the continents. We updated ESTM (Earth-like Surface Temperature Model) to incorporate the presence,…
We explore how questions related to developing a sustainable human civilization can be cast in terms of astrobiology. In particular we show how ongoing astrobiological studies of the coupled relationship between life, planets and their…
Given the growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods across all aspects of environmental sciences, it is imperative that we initiate a discussion about the ethical and responsible use of AI. In fact, much…
Essential insights on the characterization and quality of a detectable biosphere are gained by analyzing the effects of its environmental parameters. We compiled environmental and biological properties of the Phanerozoic Eon from various…
Patterns in a semiarid ecosystem are important because they directly and indirectly affect ecological processes, biodiversity, and ecosystem resilience. Understanding the causes and effects of these patterns is critical for long-term land…
Climate change is an impending disaster which is of pressing concern more and more every year. Countless efforts have been made to study the long-term effects of climate change on agriculture, land resources, and biodiversity. Studies…
Carbon offsets from voluntarily avoided deforestation projects are generated based on performance vis-\`a-vis ex-ante deforestation baselines. We examined the impacts of 27 forest conservation projects in six countries on three continents…
Island endemism is shaped by complex interactions among environmental, ecological, and evolutionary factors, yet the relative contributions of topography, climate, and land cover remain incompletely quantified. We investigated the drivers…
Movement is fundamental to life, shaping population dynamics, biodiversity patterns, and ecosystem structure. Recent advances in tracking technology have enabled fundamental questions about movement to be tackled, leading to the development…
Vegetation often understood merely as the result of long-term climate conditions. However, vegetation itself plays a fundamental role in shaping Earth's climate by regulating the energy, water, and biogeochemical cycles across terrestrial…
The Anthropocene is characterized by close interdependencies between the natural Earth system and the human society, posing novel challenges to model development. Here we present a conceptual model describing the long-term coevolution of…
Fires and rainfall are major mechanisms that regulate woody and grassy biomasses in savanna ecosystems. Conditions of long-lasting coexistence of trees and grasses have been mainly studied using continuous-time modelling of tree-grass…
Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance in understanding behavior. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory so far has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present…
Enhancing urban biodiversity is increasingly advanced as a nature-based solution that can help align public health and biodiversity conservation agendas. Yet, research on the relationship between biodiversity and psychological well-being…
Destabilization of the water cycle threatens human lives and livelihoods. Meanwhile our understanding of whether and how changes in vegetation cover could trigger abrupt transitions in moisture regimes remains incomplete. This challenge…
Global climate change has had a drastic impact on our environment. Previous study showed that pest disaster occured from global climate change may cause a tremendous number of trees died and they inevitably became a factor of forest fire.…
TRAPPIST-1 is an ultra-cool dwarf hosting a system consisting of seven planets. While orbital properties, radii and masses of the planets are nowadays well constrained, one of the open fascinating issues is the possibility that an…
Religious beliefs could facilitate human cooperation [1-6], promote civic engagement [7-10], improve life satisfaction [11-13] and even boom economic development [14-16]. On the other side, some aspects of religion may lead to regional…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Active inference helps us simulate adaptive behavior and decision-making in biological and artificial agents. Building on our previous work exploring the relationship between active inference, well-being, resilience, and sustainability, we…