Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Neotropical puzzles: Assessing the role of spatial arrangement and human-induced disturbances on the avian diversity of local patches.
Published: 2025-09-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Urbanization expansion poses significant challenges to biodiversity. Studies of urban ecology in the Global North abound, but there is an urgent to understand the drivers of biodiversity decline in highly diverse, yet vulnerable and understudied ecosystems such as Neotropical cities. Specifically, while the influence of environmental, anthropogenic, and ecological factors on biodiversity is well [...]
Jaguars Attacks on Humans in the Brazilian Amazon
Published: 2025-09-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Attacks on humans by large carnivores are well documented globally, yet jaguar (Panthera onca) attacks are widely considered rare. We reassessed this assumption by compiling all known records of jaguar attacks on humans in the Brazilian Amazon between 1950 and 2025. A total of 84 cases were identified through a combination of field documentation, local news sources and scientific literature. The [...]
ECOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS AND PREDATION DYNAMICS BETWEEN JAGUARS AND ARAGUAIA RIVER DOLPHINS
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Araguaia River dolphin (Inia araguaiaensis), classified as Vulnerable, faces threats from conflict with fisheries, habitat loss and fragmentation, pollution, and declining fish stocks. Although jaguars (Panthera onca) are known to hunt aquatic prey, predation on freshwater dolphins has been rarely documented. This study reports two confirmed cases of jaguars preying on I. araguaiaensis in the [...]
Bridging Knowledge Systems to Guide Natural Resource Decision-Making
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
International agreements call for inclusion of Indigenous and local knowledge in resource management, yet practical approaches remain underdeveloped. We argue that knowledge co-assessment offers a feasible pathway. Drawing on examples from practice in the Arctic, we provide guidance for equitable engagement, communication, and scaling, ensuring legitimacy, inclusivity, and actionable governance.
Feasibility of heart rate variability analysis for welfare assessment in dolphins: a preliminary report
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Monitoring stress and emotional states in dolphins is an important step toward improving animal welfare in managed care. Established physiological approaches, such as measuring cortisol from blood or fecal samples, have provided valuable information for stress assessment. Suction-based devices have also enabled cardiac monitoring, contributing to our understanding of diving physiology and [...]
The past, present and future of online biodiversity knowledge systems
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
In recent decades, there has been an exponential increase in the availability and accessibility of biodiversity data and a profusion of portals, tools, and platforms through which to utilise it. This reflects the extensive variety of challenges biodiversity data is being used to address and the need to enhance decision-making by different stakeholder groups. Whilst this has provided unprecedented [...]
Nine changes needed to deliver a radical transformation in biodiversity measurement
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biodiversity is declining in many parts of the world. Biological diversity measurement and monitoring are fundamental to the assessment of the causes and consequences of environmental changes, identification of key areas for the protection of biodiversity or ecosystem services, determining the effectiveness of actions, and the creation of decision-support tools critical to maintaining a [...]
The Invisible Majority: Disciplinary Bias and the Systematic Neglect of Real Biodiversity
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Taxonomy underpins all biodiversity sciences, yet its essential role in measuring and managing life on Earth remains underrecognized in conservation and policy frameworks. Analyzing 360 articles from 12 leading ecology and taxonomy journals in 2024, we reveal that ecologists overwhelmingly focus on historically familiar vertebrates, while taxonomists emphasize recently described invertebrates—the [...]
Classification and regression trees clarify the role of epistasis and environment in genotype–phenotype maps
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how genetic variation translates into phenotypic outcomes is central to various sub-fields of genetics. This task is complicated by a range of forces–including epistasis, environmental modulation of mutation effects, and ecological influences–that complicate the process of mapping from genotype to phenotype. In this study, we apply a unified decision tree approach, classification [...]
Social implications of human food subsidies on wildlife populations
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Human activities—intentionally or not—generate a variety of novel food sources that wild animals exploit. On land and in water, human food sources can profoundly alter intraspecific interactions with cascading effects on population dynamics and ecosystem functioning. Yet, despite their growing ecological relevance, the role of human food subsidies in shaping intraspecific interactions remains [...]
Novel worker-like behaviour observed in gynes of the social parasite Tetramorium microgyna
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Socially parasitic ants increase their own fitness by exploiting the labour and resources of non-kin ant colonies. Here, we report a novel worker-like behaviour observed in an African workerless inquiline, Tetramorium microgyna, a parasite of Tetramorium sericeiventre. We observed several T. microgyna gynes excavating soil and performing nest maintenance tasks at the entrance of an established T. [...]
What defines an urban butterfly? Life history traits and habitat associations of butterflies in urban environments
Published: 2025-09-19
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: 2025-09-18
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 [...]
Life-history variation mediates the importance of population structure to the short-term dynamics of plant populations worldwide
Published: 2025-09-16
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: 2025-09-14
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 [...]