Preprints
There are 2573 Preprints listed.
Movement-informed projections of Bristol Bay red king crab seasonal distribution to support spatial management decisions
Published: 2025-09-22
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Understanding seasonal shifts in the spatial distribution of Bristol Bay red king crab (BBRKC) is essential to developing adaptive management strategies that promote sustainable harvest. Although fishery harvests suggest a substantial shift in the distribution of male crab between late spring (when fishery-independent bottom trawl surveys occur) and autumn (during the directed fishery), the [...]
A Unified and Predictive Measure of Functional Diversity
Published: 2025-09-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Despite the critical role of functional diversity (FD) in understanding ecological systems and processes, its robust quantification remains a significant challenge. A long-held view in the field is that it is not possible to capture its three facets---functional richness, functional divergence, and functional evenness---in a single index. This perspective has prompted recent proposals for FD [...]
What defines an urban butterfly? Life history traits and habitat associations of butterflies in urban environments
Published: 2025-09-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Urban areas are encroaching onto semi-natural areas the world over, driving species assemblages into homogenisation. A better understanding of the life history and habitat association traits can help support management efforts to improve urban biodiversity. Urban areas present an ecological filter, limiting the number of species present compared to the wider countryside. What characteristics help [...]
From Data to Decisions: Towards a Biodiversity Monitoring Standards Framework
Published: 2025-09-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Achieving the goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), requires robust monitoring and reporting to track progress and guide action. However, our ability to understand trends is challenged because biodiversity data are fragmented and biased. This stems from the many different approaches used to record data, aggregate records, and analyze them to detect trends and [...]
PyTLidar: A Python Package for Tree QSM Modeling from Terrestrial Lidar Data
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Evolution, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
PyTLidar is an open-source Python package that reconstructs 3D tree Quantitative Structure Models (QSM) from Terrestrial Lidar Scanning (TLS) data, providing a user-friendly tool that improves and expands upon the MATLAB-based TreeQSM method. QSMs are used to automate detection and calculation of various topological and volumetric measurements that would normally take great effort to gather in [...]
Trophic Reorganization and Energy Deficit: A Multispecies Size-Spectrum Model of the Grand Banks
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Marine ecosystems face unprecedented pressures from fishing and climate change, with both bottom-up energy transfer and top-down predation influencing ecosystem control, though their relative importance varies across space and time. The Grand Banks of Newfoundland provides a compelling case study, where capelin (Mallotus villosus) biomass collapsed by 99% in 1990–1991, followed by the collapse of [...]
Trends of ungulate species in Europe: not all stories are equal
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Zoology
Wild ungulates have deep impacts on socio-ecological systems, and analyzing large-scale population trends in a multispecies set can identify their environmental and socio-economic drivers. We collected annual hunting bags (n = 11,046, period 1975-2018) of 7 wild ungulates of high management interest across 25 European countries. We identified different temporal trends in hunting bags and for roe [...]
England’s statutory biodiversity metric offers lessons in ensuring metrics for nature markets measure true change
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy
The need for standardized metrics for measuring losses and gains in biodiversity has resulted in many countries, and private sector initiatives, looking to adapt the England’s Statutory Biodiversity Metric for mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG). BNG requires a minimum 10% uplift in biodiversity units out of infrastructure development, and these number of biodiversity units depends in part on [...]
Passive acoustic monitoring and deep learning reveal spatiotemporal patterns in gibbon calling behaviour associated with habitat and climate variables
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
1. Understanding the basic ecology of endangered species is essential for effective conservation, yet this remains challenging for elusive species inhabiting tropical forests. For the endangered Bornean white-bearded gibbon (Hylobates albibarbis), basic ecological information remains limited. Most research on the species is restricted to peat swamp forests, while little is known from other forest [...]
Life-history variation mediates the importance of population structure to the short-term dynamics of plant populations worldwide
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
A population’s structure (i.e., the distribution of individuals across the life cycle of a species) influences how it responds to environmental changes and recurrent disturbances, and shapes its vulnerability to extinction. Yet, despite compelling evidence that population structures are rarely stationary over time, assessments of population viability have only recently begun to consider how a [...]
Dietary preferences and behaviour of the Southern Lesser Bushbaby Galago moholi (Loriformes: Galagidae) foraging at an entomological light trap
Published: 2025-09-15
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
The Southern Lesser Bushbaby Galago moholi is a small, nocturnal, strepsirrhine primate, native to Sub-Saharan Africa. Previously considered a strict dietary specialist on tree exudates and insects, recent observations have revealed hitherto unappreciated plasticity in its feeding behaviour, encompassing fruits and even small vertebrates. While arthropods are an important seasonal component of [...]
Introduced urban lizards (Podarcis muralis) exhibit environmentally plastic activity patterns and precise behavioral thermoregulation
Published: 2025-09-15
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Integrative Biology, Zoology
The ability to effectively thermoregulate is important for most ectotherms, as body temperature determines the rate of nearly all physiological processes. However, for most organisms we lack understanding of which environmental factors affect thermoregulatory behaviors, especially outside of a laboratory setting, and how individual behaviors scale over an entire day and at the population level. [...]
Beyond the green: Socioeconomic and climatic pressures on native vegetation in the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor
Published: 2025-09-15
Subjects: Biology
This study examines how climatic and socioeconomic variables influence native vegetation cover across 108 municipalities within the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor (ABC), an ecologically strategic region in central Brazil that connects Amazonian and Cerrado biomes and supports habitat continuity for wide-ranging species such as jaguars (Panthera onca). The corridor was defined as a 40 km-wide [...]
Vendi Information Gain for Active Learning and its Application to Ecology
Published: 2025-09-15
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity
While monitoring biodiversity through camera traps has become an important endeavor for ecological research, identifying species in the captured image data remains a major bottleneck due to limited labeling resources. Active learning—a machine learning paradigm that selects the most informative data to label and train a predictive model—offers a promising solution, but typically focuses on [...]
Inferring the dynamics of selective constraints across complex ontogenies
Published: 2025-09-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Most organisms undergo a series of complex phenotypic changes throughout their life cycles that allow them to meet the demands of different niches throughout ontogeny. Theory suggests the significant coordination required to undergo such ontogenetic transitions can impose evolutionary constraints on variation to developmental programs. This produces patterns known as developmental hourglasses, [...]