TY - JOUR
T1 - Habitability Models for Astrobiology
AU - Méndez, Abel
AU - Rivera-Valentín, Edgard G.
AU - Schulze-Makuch, Dirk
AU - Filiberto, Justin
AU - Ramírez, Ramses M.
AU - Wood, Tana E.
AU - Dávila, Alfonso
AU - McKay, Chris
AU - Ceballos, Kevin N.Ortiz
AU - Jusino-Maldonado, Marcos
AU - Torres-Santiago, Nicole J.
AU - Nery, Guillermo
AU - Heller, René
AU - Byrne, Paul K.
AU - Malaska, Michael J.
AU - Nathan, Erica
AU - Simões, Marta Filipa
AU - Antunes, André
AU - Martínez-Frías, Jesús
AU - Carone, Ludmila
AU - Izenberg, Noam R.
AU - Atri, Dimitra
AU - Chitty, Humberto Itic Carvajal
AU - Nowajewski-Barra, Priscilla
AU - Rivera-Hernández, Frances
AU - Brown, Corine Y.
AU - Lynch, Kennda L.
AU - Catling, David
AU - Zuluaga, Jorge I.
AU - Salazar, Juan F.
AU - Chen, Howard
AU - González, Grizelle
AU - Jagadeesh, Madhu Kashyap
AU - Haqq-Misra, Jacob
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by a NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) workshop grant, the Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL), and the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo (UPR Arecibo). Thanks to NASA Puerto Rico Space Grant Consortium and the Puerto Rico Louis Stokes Alliance For Minority Participation (PR-LSAMP) for supporting some of our students. Thanks to Ravi Kumar Kop-parapu from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and James Kasting from Penn State for valuable comments. RH is supported by the German space agency (Deutsches Zen-trum für Luft-und Raumfahrt) under PLATO Data Center grant 50OO1501. RMR is supported by the Earth-Life Science Institute and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences: Astrobiology Center (grant number JY310064). AA and MFS are funded by the Science and Technology Development Fund, Macau SAR. JHM gratefully acknowledges support from the NASA Exobiology program under grant 80NSSC20K0622. GG was supported by the NSF Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory (EAR-1331841) and the LTER program (DEB 1831952). JF acknowledges partial support from NASA PSTAR grant 80NSSC18K1686. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service’s International Institute of Tropical Forestry (IITF) and UPR Río Piedras provided additional support. A portion of the research by MM was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). This is LPI contribution number 2596. LPI is operated by USRA under a cooperative agreement with the Science Mission Directorate of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.
PY - 2021/8
Y1 - 2021/8
N2 - Habitability has been generally defined as the capability of an environment to support life. Ecologists have been using Habitat Suitability Models (HSMs) for more than four decades to study the habitability of Earth from local to global scales. Astrobiologists have been proposing different habitability models for some time, with little integration and consistency among them, being different in function to those used by ecologists. Habitability models are not only used to determine whether environments are habitable, but they also are used to characterize what key factors are responsible for the gradual transition from low to high habitability states. Here we review and compare some of the different models used by ecologists and astrobiologists and suggest how they could be integrated into new habitability standards. Such standards will help improve the comparison and characterization of potentially habitable environments, prioritize target selections, and study correlations between habitability and biosignatures. Habitability models are the foundation of planetary habitability science, and the synergy between ecologists and astrobiologists is necessary to expand our understanding of the habitability of Earth, the Solar System, and extrasolar planets.
AB - Habitability has been generally defined as the capability of an environment to support life. Ecologists have been using Habitat Suitability Models (HSMs) for more than four decades to study the habitability of Earth from local to global scales. Astrobiologists have been proposing different habitability models for some time, with little integration and consistency among them, being different in function to those used by ecologists. Habitability models are not only used to determine whether environments are habitable, but they also are used to characterize what key factors are responsible for the gradual transition from low to high habitability states. Here we review and compare some of the different models used by ecologists and astrobiologists and suggest how they could be integrated into new habitability standards. Such standards will help improve the comparison and characterization of potentially habitable environments, prioritize target selections, and study correlations between habitability and biosignatures. Habitability models are the foundation of planetary habitability science, and the synergy between ecologists and astrobiologists is necessary to expand our understanding of the habitability of Earth, the Solar System, and extrasolar planets.
KW - Astrobiology
KW - Biosignatures
KW - Exoplanets
KW - Habitability
KW - Habitat Suitability Models
KW - Planetary habitability
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UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85104500297&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1089/ast.2020.2342
DO - 10.1089/ast.2020.2342
M3 - Review article
C2 - 34382857
AN - SCOPUS:85104500297
SN - 1531-1074
VL - 21
SP - 1017
EP - 1027
JO - Astrobiology
JF - Astrobiology
IS - 8
ER -