Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Advancing Amazonian botanical knowledge: a detailed ecological characterization of an open ombrophile forest, southwest Amazonian Brazil
Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biodiversity inventories present excellent opportunities for ecological investigations and the classification of different threats to the community, nonetheless these applications are not frequently employed. Our main objective was to determine the tree and palm community within a one-hectare areas, also exploring the association between functional attributes and the projected threat of category [...]
A method to estimate actual infrastructure-induced mortality by integrating sampling biases
Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Human infrastructures are among the most impactful wildlife threats. Although estimates of animal mortality by these structures exist over a given period, they typically do not account for several detection biases (i.e., difference between recorded and true mortality). Consequently, true mortality rates may be severely underestimated, as well as their impact on populations and species.2. We [...]
Pattern-informed energetics: Energy allocation modeling for predicting trait variation and population persistence
Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology
Energetics drive emergent ecosystem processes, shaping behavior and population dynamics in response to environmental conditions. While energy budget models can be used to effectively link resource dynamics to fitness outcomes, they often lack empirical grounding for energy allocation under resource constraints. Here, we introduce the Pattern-Informed Energetics (PIE) framework, which [...]
AmphiTherm: a comprehensive database of amphibian thermal tolerance and preference
Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Thermal traits are crucial to our understanding of the ecology and physiology of ectothermic animals. While rising global temperatures have increasingly pushed research towards the study of upper thermal limits, lower thermal limits and thermal preferences are essential for defining the thermal niche of ectotherms. Through a systematic review of the literature in seven languages, we expanded an [...]
The Physical and Chemical Basis for Temperature Effects on Metabolic Rate and Biological Processes – A Brief History
Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Java Transitional
Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Java Transitional is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Southern Java and Cocos-Keeling/Christmas Island. The Java Transitional mangrove province mapped extent in 2020 was 159.9 km2, representing 0.1% of the global mangrove area. The biota is characterized by 34 species of true mangroves. Java [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the North Brazil Shelf
Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the North Brazil Shelf (NBS) are a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Amazonia, Guianan, Northeastern Brazil, and the Southern Caribbean. The NBS mangrove province had a mapped extent in 2020 of 13204.0 km2, representing 9.0% of the global mangrove area. The biota is characterized by Rhizophora [...]
Challenges and opportunities when assessing exposure of financial investments to ecosystem regime shifts
Published: 2025-03-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Financial investments will be affected by ecological regime shifts through the loss of natural resources underpinning dependencies of most economic sectors. We suggest one possible pathway to link industry and products to the likelihood of ecological regime shifts. The challenges and opportunities are discussed at each step, including datasets, methods and metrics. To this end, we identify recent [...]
Individual variation in perceived density and its impacts on the realization of ecological niches
Published: 2025-03-06
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Organisms gain information about their local environment using different senses. Variation in both reception and assessment of stimuli leads to differences among individuals in their perception of environments. Here, we highlight the importance of acknowledging and investigating such individual differences by focusing on perceived density, the individual’s assessment of local density. We [...]
Monitoring ecological corridors for nature and people
Published: 2025-03-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Ecological corridors designed to maintain ecological connectivity between protected and conserved areas is a conservation strategy that is increasingly embraced around the world. Monitoring corridor effectiveness is essential to gauge progress toward connectivity conservation objectives; it also fosters learning among diverse rightsholders and interested parties. In particular, monitoring how [...]
Mining for Species, Locations, Habitats, and Ecosystems from Scientific Papers in Invasion Biology: A Large-Scale Exploratory Study with Large Language Models
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
This paper presents an exploratory study that harnesses the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to mine key ecological entities from invasion biology literature. Specifically, we focus on extracting species names, their locations, associated habitats, and ecosystems, information that is critical for understanding species spread, predicting future invasions, and informing conservation [...]
Indirect effects dominate ecosystem service losses in response to agricultural intensification
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Feeding a growing human population while preventing biodiversity loss is a major challenge. Land conversion impacts multiple ecosystem services (ESs), including food production and biodiversity-dependent services; yet, the role of indirect effects on ESs within this context, such as parasitoids boosting crop yield by controlling herbivores, remains poorly understood. Using species-network data [...]
Tracheal chambers as a key innovation for high frequency emission in bat echolocation.
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology
Key innovations play a crucial role in driving biodiversity and facilitating evolutionary success by enabling organisms to adapt to various ecological niches through the diversification of phenotypic traits. These innovations have been observed in different vertebrate clades, such as mammals evolving hypsodonty to graze on contemporary grasses and bats with the evolution of echolocation, [...]
MIGRACIÓN DE UN AVE COSTERA: LA GAVIOTA GARUMA (Leucophaeus modestus) Y SU DINÁMICA OCUPACIONAL EN EL PARQUE NACIONAL PAN DE AZÚCAR
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
La gaviota garuma es un ave costera migratoria austral que se distribuye por la costa oeste de Sudamérica, y que nidifica en el interior del desierto de Atacama, Chile. En el Parque Nacional Pan de Azúcar, la gaviota garuma es el ave más abundante. Durante 2 años monitoreamos mensualmente los individuos presentes en la costa. Se identificaron más gaviotas garumas en verano del primer año que en [...]
A pragmatic framework for local operationalisation of national-level biodiversity impact mitigation commitments
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Countries around the world are attempting to navigate complex trade-offs between biodiversity and other land use objectives such as infrastructure expansion, with many adopting “net outcomes” policies that aim to ensure economic development leaves biodiversity better off than before. The implementation of net outcomes policies often occurs on a project-by-project basis, which can lead to [...]