Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Life cycle complexity drives variation in thermal tolerance and plasticity
Published: 2026-02-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Accumulating evidence suggests that heat tolerance varies substantially across insect development, yet patterns of variation remain difficult to generalise across species. We discuss how the diversity of insect developmental strategies shapes both the intensity and predictability of thermal environments across ontogeny, and how this likely generates variation in heat tolerance, plasticity, and [...]
The potential for passive acoustic monitoring and automated detection to improve conservation efforts of tarsiers in Sulawesi, Indonesia
Published: 2026-02-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Tarsiers are small, haplorrhine primates that occur in Southeast Asia. Tarsiers on the island of Sulawesi range from Vulnerable to Critically Endangered, and many are data deficient, which means there is a great need for improved monitoring approaches. Sulawesi tarsiers are pair-living, territorial, and engage in duets within human hearing range, which makes them ideal candidates for passive [...]
Policy-Driven Forest Recovery in a Crisis-Affected Landscape: A Remote Sensing Study in the Rohingya Refugee Region of Bangladesh
Published: 2026-02-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Human displacement crises often place sudden pressure on forested environments where shelter materials and cooking fuel are sourced directly from nearby natural resources. Since 2017, the Rohingya refugee influx into Ukhiya and Teknaf sub-districts (Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh) has exerted intense pressure on surrounding forests through rapid settlement expansion and fuelwood extraction. In response, [...]
Evolutionary diversification of ecological specialists under informed resource choice
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Behavior can be an important modulator of eco-evolutionary dynamics and genetic evolution that is not always taken into account in models of evolutionary diversification. On the one hand, classical models for the evolution of ecological specialization have been extended to account for flexible behavioral aspects such as diet choice or matching habitat choice, but only in a subset of all spatial [...]
Biodiversity footprint of public procurement in Finland
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Halting biodiversity loss requires systematic action from all sectors of society. The public sector is a significant actor globally in creating markets for goods and services, public procurement representing on average 13 – 20% of national gross domestic product. In this study, we assessed the biodiversity footprint of public procurement in Finland for years 2021 and 2022. We applied the [...]
Diversity in a fuzzy world: a review of models and measures
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Biological diversity metrics have evolved from simple species counts to measures that incorporate increasingly complex functional information. A critical aspect is that different families of diversity indices are grounded in distinct mathematical models for representing uncertainty, including classical set theory, probability theory, and fuzzy set theory, which shape what these measures can [...]
Environmental gradients shape community composition, energy pathways, and trophic dynamics in a coastal Arctic food web
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
A central question in ecology is how environmental heterogeneity structures community composition and trophic organization, and whether changes in physical conditions alter energy pathways without changing overall network connectivity. Arctic food webs have generally been quantified at broader spatial scales which must average spatial heterogeneity, limiting the ability to quantify asymmetric [...]
Critical methodological flaws in Feurer et al. (2025) render its findings untrustworthy
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
A recent article by Feurer et al. (2025) aimed to synthesise literature on the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation globally. The stated aim of the review, to assess what are the proximate causes and underlying drivers of deforestation and forest degradation worldwide, is timely and relevant for ongoing policy efforts, for example zero-deforestation commitments and EU Deforestation [...]
Eelgrass-associated fishes show large interspecific differences in thermal acclimation to marine heatwaves
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Global warming is increasingly exposing shallow coastal habitats to thermal extremes, with important consequences for the fish species they support. Eelgrass (Zostera marina), the most widespread seagrass in the Northern Hemisphere, provides nursery habitats and foraging opportunities for a high diversity of temperate fishes. However, light limitation is compressing eelgrass depth distribution to [...]
Superorganismal Anisogamy: a Comparative Test of an Extended Theory
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Multicellular organisms and superorganisms (e.g., ant colonies) are both products of major evolutionary transitions in individuality, and they share many analogous traits. Theory developed to explain the evolution of one such trait, anisogamy, has recently been adapted to explain its superorganismal analogue: large egg-like queens and small sperm-like males. To test this theory with comparative [...]
First Report of Bilateral Gynandromorphism in the Australian Ant, Dolichoderus scrobiculatus (Mayr, 1876) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Gynandromorphism is a rare developmental phenomenon producing genetically chimeric individuals expressing both male and female phenotypes simultaneously. Here, I describe the morphological anomalies arising from a case of bilateral worker-male gynandromorphism in the Australian ant Dolichoderus scrobiculatus (Mayr, 1876), collected during a pitfall survey of native ant fauna. The specimen [...]
Closing the border on Australia’s domestic elephant ivory trade
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Law, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Australia’s domestic market for elephant (Elephantidae ssp.) ivory remains active online, despite long-standing international controls and pledges to close domestic trade. We conducted snapshot monitoring of surface-web vendors (online auction houses and webstores with ‘buy-it-now’ payment options) and a survey of Facebook Marketplace posts made between January and June 2025, sampled every two [...]
Integrating general and targeted biodiversity monitoring through parallel survey designs to improve indicator robustness
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Breeding Bird Monitoring Schemes (BMS) provide large-scale, long-term data essential for biodiversity assessment and conservation decision-making. However, their multispecies design can generate species-specific detectability biases, particularly for taxa whose behavioral or ecological traits deviate from standardized count assumptions, potentially affecting abundance estimates and population [...]
General flowering in temperate forests arises from multi-timescale community synchrony
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Community-wide “general flowering” has been regarded as a tropical phenomenon. Here, we show that temperate forests also exhibit community-wide flowering at the regional scale. Annual seed-production records for seven dominant tree species across 432 forest sites, analysed with timescale-explicit wavelet metrics, reveal landscape-scale synchrony structured by two periods — a 2–4-year band and a [...]
Factors influencing the use of scientific evidence in conservation practice and policy: insights from a systematic map
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Evidence-based conservation can lead to better outcomes for biodiversity, through the integration of scientific evidence with other forms of knowledge to make transparent and effective decisions. However, despite efforts to promote evidence-based practice, many management and policy decisions do not incorporate scientific information. To strengthen the interface between science and [...]