Related papers: Conservation priority mapping to prevent zoonotic …
We study a network design problem motivated by the challenge of placing wildlife crossings to reconnect fragmented habitats of animal species, which is among the 17 goals towards sustainable development by the UN: Given a graph, whose…
Mounting evidence indicates that our planet might experience runaway effects associated to rising temperatures and ecosystem overexploitation, leading to catastrophic shifts on short time scales. Remediation scenarios capable of…
Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, impacting ecosystem services necessary to ensure food, water, and human health and well-being. Understanding the distribution of species and their habitats is crucial for conservation…
Land use expansion is linked to major sustainability concerns including climate change, food security and biodiversity loss. This expansion is largely concentrated in so-called frontiers, defined here as places experiencing marked…
Biodiversity loss driven by agricultural intensification is a pressing global issue, with significant implications for ecosystem stability and human well-being. Existing policy instruments have so far proven insufficient in halting this…
If rock beats scissors and scissors beat paper, one might assume that rock beats paper too. But this is not the case for intransitive relationships that make up the famous rock-paper-scissors game. However, the sole presence of paper might…
Biodiversity is essential to the viability of ecological systems. Species diversity in ecosystems is promoted by cyclic, non-hierarchical interactions among competing populations. Such non-transitive relations lead to an evolution with…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) path planning algorithms often assume a knowledge reward function or priority map, indicating the most important areas to visit. In this paper we propose a method to create priority maps for monitoring or…
Zoonotic diseases spread through pathogens-infected animal carriers. In the case of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), evidence supports that the main carriers are fruit bats and non-human primates. Further, EVD spread is a multi-factorial problem…
Frequent emergence of communicable diseases has been a major concern worldwide. Lack of sufficient resources to mitigate the disease-burden makes the situation even more challenging for lower-income countries. Hence, strategy development…
Worldwide, we are experiencing an unprecedented, accelerated loss of biodiversity triggered by a bundle of anthropogenic threats such as habitat destruction, environmental pollution and climate change. Despite all efforts of the European…
The preservation of soil health is a critical challenge in the 21st century due to its significant impact on agriculture, human health, and biodiversity. We provide the first deep investigation of the predictive potential of machine…
Difficulties identifying appropriate biodiversity impact metrics remain a major barrier to inclusion of biodiversity considerations in environmentally responsible investment. We propose and analyse a simple science-based local metric: the…
Accumulating observational evidence suggests an intimate connection between rapidly expanding insect populations, deforestation, and global climate change. We review the evidence, emphasizing the vulnerability of key planetary carbon pools,…
As our professional, social, and financial existences become increasingly digitized and as our government, healthcare, and military infrastructures rely more on computer technologies, they present larger and more lucrative targets for…
Biogeographical regions (geographically distinct assemblages of species and communities) constitute a cornerstone for ecology, biogeography, evolution and conservation biology. Species turnover measures are often used to quantify…
A key problem in modelling the evolution dynamics of infectious diseases is the mathematical representation of the mechanism of transmission of the contagion. Models with a finite number of subpopulations can be described via systems of…
Human activity continues to have an enormous negative impact on the ability of the planet to sustain human and other forms of life. Six out of the nine planetary boundaries have been crossed, a seventh is close to threshold. Prominent…
Effective management of agricultural landscapes is critical for meeting global biodiversity targets, but efforts are hampered by the absence of detailed, large-scale ecological maps. To address this, we introduce Farmscapes, the first…
The stability and ability of an ecosystem to withstand climate change is directly linked to its biodiversity. Dead trees are a key indicator of overall forest health, housing one-third of forest ecosystem biodiversity, and constitute 8%of…