Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
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 [...]
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 [...]
Dancing on Linnaeus’ Palm: Divergence of Species Scapes between ecologists and taxonomists
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Taxonomy is foundational to the life sciences, yet remains structurally undervalued in systems of research evaluation that rely on short-term citation metrics. To explore the roots of this imbalance, we analysed 360 open-access articles published in 2024 across 12 major journals in ecology and taxonomy. Our results reveal a striking divergence: ecological journals overwhelmingly focus on [...]