Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Mapping California woodland-chaparral ecosystems following wildfire with diverse drone images and computer vision
Published: 2025-10-07
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
Fire is a key driver of vegetation dynamics in California's woodland-chaparral ecosystems, and its role has become ever more important in recent decades as wildfire extents and frequencies increase. Understanding post-fire vegetation transitions and the likelihood of type conversion is essential for effective land management. Remote sensing represents a powerful tool to map vegetation cover and [...]
Reconciling short- and long-term predictions for ecosystem management
Published: 2025-10-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Management plans grounded in scientific evidence can be used to limit the impacts of ongoing global changes on socio-ecological systems. In this framework, modeling tools play a crucial role in informing and supporting management strategies. 2. While the urgency of implementing evidence-based actions directed most scientific efforts towards short-term ecological forecasting (ranging from [...]
Larger mangrove forests carry lower and healthier ones higher malaria risk: the importance of integrating mangrove conservation with vector management at local scale
Published: 2025-10-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Malaria remains a major public health challenge causing an annual estimated 600,000 deaths and 250 million infections. While most malaria vector control efforts focus on freshwater mosquito species, saltwater-tolerant mosquitoes inhabiting coastal ecosystems like mangrove forests remain understudied. Historically, mangrove forests have been perceived as breeding grounds for malaria vectors, which [...]
Development and implementation of a passive surveillance system for Aedes albopictus in Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Published: 2025-10-06
Subjects: Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Public Health, Statistical Methodology, Virus Diseases
The invasive Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) has become an important public health concern in Italy, particularly in the Po Valley area, where its biting behaviour and nuisance have contributed to multiple outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases over the last two decades. To address this growing threat, the Emilia-Romagna region has conducted intensive mosquito monitoring efforts since 2010, [...]
Genomic insights into the origin of ecotypes
Published: 2025-10-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A century ago, Göte Turesson introduced the ecotype concept to describe populations of species that are phenotypically and genetically differentiated by adaptation to contrasting habitats. His simple idea—that ecological divergence can occur below the species level—has had lasting influence, inspiring experimental tests of local adaptation across taxa. Today, ecotypes are described throughout the [...]
Narrative-Movement Framework (NMF): A socio-ecological systems (SES) approach to human narratives, animal movement, and coexistence in shared landscapes
Published: 2025-10-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Arts and Humanities, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
1. Managing human-wildlife coexistence is essential for biodiversity conservation in places where humans and nonhumans compete for access to ecosystems. Viewing human-wildlife conflict as part of a complex web of positive and negative connections that exist between humans and nature is essential. 2. The field of socio-ecological systems (SES) seeks to understand these connections between [...]
Preprint for "The properties of individual fire events are essential for understanding global fire regimes"
Published: 2025-10-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aim: As fire activity changes globally, we need to better understand the spatial and temporal characteristics of the individual events that, when aggregated, constitute fire regimes. Most global studies analyze point detections of burned area, without delineating or considering the properties of individual events. Furthermore, there is a critical need to understand fire patterns within the [...]
What fraction of the genomic basis of local adaptation are we missing?
Published: 2025-10-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
How will species adapt to changing environments? To what extent does adaptation to previous conditions maintain the variation needed to adapt to future conditions? To answer these kinds of questions, we need to identify locally adaptive alleles and quantify their effects. Theory shows that the architecture of adaptation can depend upon the nature of mutation and on how ecology shapes the [...]
Global biodiversity measurement to meet scale-dependent needs and opportunities
Published: 2025-10-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Business, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In the face of rapid ecological decline, biodiversity information is essential for safeguarding life on Earth. Although this information is increasingly valued by governments, businesses, and other stakeholders, it remains insufficiently accessible and usable. Because the rarity and functions of biodiversity vary greatly across land- and seascapes, the global and local ecological and social [...]
Linking actions to outcomes for biodiversity in Nordic forestry
Published: 2025-10-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
The lack of a unified biodiversity metric to measure outcomes against a company’s biodiversity ambitions and societal conservation goals has hindered the implementation of a rigorous, science-based approach to biodiversity actions by companies. Here we propose that the Species Threat Abatement and Restoration (STAR) metric offers a science-based framework for forestry companies to measure and [...]
Complex effects of sex reversal on reproductive success in wild frogs
Published: 2025-10-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Sex reversal, when the environment overrides genotypic sex determination, is theorized to exert wide-ranging effects on population dynamics and evolution in ectothermic animals. The expected outcomes critically depend on the reproductive ability of sex-reversed individuals and the viability of their offspring, but empirically next to nothing is known about these traits in natural populations. [...]
CartograPlant: Bridging genomic, phenotypic, and environmental data to advance plant resilience and eco-evolutionary insight
Published: 2025-09-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Pathology, Systems Biology
Climate change is threatening plant health and productivity at all spatial scales, and these impacts are further compounded by the rising incidence of invasive pests and pathogens. Effectively addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive understanding of plant demography as well as the mechanisms and drivers of adaptation. Achieving this understanding requires the integration of [...]
Translational biodiversity beyond genomics: toward systemic action
Published: 2025-09-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biodiversity science faces the urgent challenge of being effectively connected to real-world action in the context of climate change and accelerating biodiversity loss. The concept of “translational biodiversity,” which we define as the process of translating biodiversity knowledge into practical applications across science, policy, society, and economy, has largely remained confined to genomics, [...]
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 [...]