Preprints
There are 2480 Preprints listed.
Rethinking termite methane emissions: does the mound environment matter?
Published: 2025-08-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Termites are important decomposers in tropical ecosystems, and they emit methane (CH4) from digesting plant matter. Termite contributions to global CH4 emissions are calculated using species-specific termite CH4 emissions from individuals (termite emission factors; TEF) and estimated biomass, which overlooks how the termite mound environment may alter emissions to the atmosphere. Factors such as [...]
Using Elicit AI research assistant for data extraction in systematic reviews: a feasibility study across environmental and life sciences
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Data extraction in systematic reviews, maps and meta-analyses is time-consuming and prone to human error or subjective judgment. Large Language Models offer potential for automating this process, yet their performance has been evaluated in a limited range of platforms, disciplines, and review types. We assessed the performance of the Elicit platform across diverse data extraction tasks using [...]
What we talk about when we talk about species
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Genome annotation, alignment, and phylogenetics are at the center of most work in evolutionary genomics. These techniques function best when rooted in prior work. Genes are mined from new genomes using evidence from old gene models. These genomes are aligned to well-worn references to create matrices for tree reconstruction. And trees are often populated with well characterized genomes to add [...]
Strain-specific thermal acclimation, but little evidence of transgenerational plasticity, in an asexual crustacean
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Transgenerational plasticity has been suggested as a means for species to succeed in rapidly changing environments, such as increased temperature brought on by climate change. However, the evidence for this phenomenon in animals is mixed. The freshwater crustacean Daphnia magna displays transgenerational plasticity in response to environmental cues such as the presence of predators or food, but [...]
DualStack: Multi-Resolution Spectrogram Fusion Improves Bird Sound Classification for Ecological Monitoring
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Engineering
Automated bird sound classification plays a critical role in biodiversity assessment, ecological monitoring, and conservation research. Many current approaches use single-resolution spectrograms, which fail to fully capture the multi-scale acoustic features of avian vocalizations. We present DualStack, a new method that vertically stacks high-resolution and low-resolution Mel spectrograms into a [...]
Mitonuclear divergence predicts gradual speciation in animal hybrid zones
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
The core of speciation is the genetic incompatibilities underlying the evolution of reproductive isolation. Hybrid zones provide unique opportunities to unravel the evolutionary rate of reproductive isolation in the origin of species. The selection against hybrids accrues with increased genetic incompatibilities and drives the evolution of reproductive isolation in the face of gene flow. There [...]
Opportunities for Cities to Cultivate Biodiversity
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Policy, Environmental Studies, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Plant Sciences, Public Policy, Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration, Systems Biology, Urban Studies and Planning
Cities pose a major threat to global biodiversity in every sense of the word. Municipal leaders have opportunities to promote biodiversity efforts in their cities. Several studies have shown that managing resources with biodiversity in mind within cities is effective and benefits both human and non-human residents and visitors. Two major opportunities for biodiversity investment in urban areas [...]
Predictive Evolutionary Genomics: Principles, Validation, and Practice
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Population Biology
Contemporary evolution occurs on observable timescales, enabling prospective evolutionary forecasting with quantitative frameworks rather than only retrospective inference. We propose a unified probabilistic framework that integrates three approaches linked to detectability windows through time. Trait-based models use multivariate quantitative-genetic equations to project correlated phenotypic [...]
Progress toward sustainable management of marine crustacean fisheries
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Population Biology
Marine crustacean capture fisheries have been contributing increasingly more to global aquatic food production in recent decades, helping secure socioeconomic benefits. In the past decade the landings of marine crustaceans rose by more than 67% while expanding spatially and taxonomically, doubling their contribution to global fisheries landings. Although efforts to improve the data collection [...]
Trapper Citizen Science: an open-source camera trap platform for citizen science in wildlife research and management
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Computational Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Effective wildlife monitoring is essential for biodiversity conservation and sustainable management, particularly in the face of rapid environmental changes and human-wildlife interactions. Advances in camera trap technology and citizen science, here used to denote non-professional involvement in scientific research, irrespective of citizenship status, have revolutionized ecological data [...]
Forest Carbon Diligence: Digital MRV for Jurisdictional and Voluntary Offsets Markets
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Forest Sciences, Technology and Innovation
Forest Carbon Diligence is a digital MRV system for mapping forest structure and forest carbon over time. This manuscript describes the qualities of the Diligence datasets — annual maps of canopy cover, canopy height, aboveground carbon density, change detection, and their uncertainties — and quantifies performance across multiple MRV contexts. Canopy height and canopy cover regression metrics [...]
Global 1-km land cover for ecological modelling from very high resolution imagery
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
National-scale estimates of mammal species abundance in Italy for the Habitat Directive reporting
Published: 2025-08-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
This report describes the methodological frameworks developed in collaboration with ATIt ETS (https://www.mammiferi.org) to estimate the abundance of mammal populations at the scale of Italy for the species listed under Annexes II, IV, and V of the Habitats Directive. For each species, the estimation methodology was defined based on the availability and quality of data supplied by the individual [...]
Birdwatchers’ attitudes and preferences that influence their decisions to engage in local, national, and international birdwatching trips
Published: 2025-08-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Birdwatching tourism has significant economic potential and is a growing form of ecotourism. Birdwatchers throughout the United States have diverse attitudes and motivations, and here we sought to understand how, and why, birdwatchers select birdwatching destinations at local, in-country, and international scales. A questionnaire survey (n=427 participants) revealed that 98% participate in local [...]
Urbanization Effects on Plant Parasitism: A Multi-Regional Comparison of Endemic Occurrence and Outbreak Intensity
Published: 2025-08-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Parasitology, Plant Pathology, Urban Studies and Planning
Microbial and insect parasitism plays a crucial role in shaping plant communities. The urban stress hypothesis posits that urbanization increases parasitism owing to the physiological environment, whereas the habitat fragmentation hypothesis suggests that habitat fragmentation in urban areas suppresses disease transmission. In the epidemiological triangle (comprising pathogen occurrence, [...]