Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Response to “Radiolarian evolution: Analytical challenges in estimating the diversity and origin of Nature’s stars”
Published: 2025-11-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Genetics and Genomics, Marine Biology
We appreciate Daniel Lahr’s concern (Lahr, 2025) on the interpretation and conclusions of our study “Extant diversity, biogeography, and evolutionary history of Radiolaria” (Sandin et al., 2025). Given that some of these comments were already addressed in our original study following reviewers comments and that such issues are well known in the molecular diversity and evolution fields we [...]
Paradigms and Principles for Integrating Nature Technologies in Biodiversity Monitoring
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Biodiversity
Employing a combination of nature technologies such as satellite data, eDNA, camera traps, passive acoustic sensors, and GPS monitors can augment traditional biodiversity measurements to help respond to increasing demand for understanding conservation status and outcomes. However, there is no clear guidance or consensus on how nature technologies are best integrated. We aim to provide a robust [...]
Barking up the wrong tree? Indian street dog woes are emblematic of ecological governance failures for multispecies coexistence
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
On August 11, 2025, India’s Supreme Court mandated relocating 2.5 million dogs to address bites and zoonotic disease/death concerns—but reversed course twice since then—revealing that solutions require sequential waste management, education, and sterilization that prioritize addressing root demographic and behavioral drivers over reactive management.
Beta-Diversity Beyond Bias: A Scalable Framework for Reliable Diversity Analysis from Citizen Science Data
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Citizen science data offer unprecedented spatial and temporal coverage for biodiversity research, yet sampling biases compromise their reliability for β-diversity analyses. We introduce a comprehensive framework to address these challenges, integrating space–time scaling, quality thresholds, and multiple partitioning approaches to enhance detection of ecological signals. Applying our framework to [...]
Interacting disturbances reshape bird assemblages via divergent community trajectories across southeastern Australia
Published: 2025-11-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Species counts can remain stable even as ecological communities collapse. This paradox exposes a critical blind spot in biodiversity monitoring: richness metrics miss the compositional upheaval that defines modern ecological change. As human pressures intensify, specialists decline and generalists proliferate, creating numerically similar but functionally different communities. Using three [...]
The hidden structure of unstructured citizen science insect monitoring
Published: 2025-11-11
Subjects: Biodiversity
Insects are vastly under-represented in biodiversity monitoring, leading to uncertainties about their trends. Semi-structured monitoring, relying on protocol reporting than protocol standardization, has emerged as a promising and more flexible alternative to structured monitoring, retaining broad participation. We examined the potential opportunities and barriers for semi-structured monitoring of [...]
Recolonisation dynamics of grey wolves: delayed recovery in a Central European country
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Population Biology, Zoology
Grey wolves have been recovering throughout Europe over the last decades, widely portrayed as a conservation success story. We evaluated the trends and demography of two wolf populations that recolonised the Czech Republic between 2011/2012 and 2022/2023, integrating a variety of fieldwork and laboratory methods including snow tracking, camera trapping, telemetry and non-invasive genetics, with [...]
How much monitoring is needed to reliably track progress towards genetic diversity targets?
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Population Biology
Achieving global biodiversity targets hinges on indicators of biodiversity change that convert raw data into reliable numbers that can shape policy, conservation, management, and, ultimately, the future of biodiversity worldwide. Indicators can only be used confidently if they detect and summarise biodiversity trends as intended, given the available data worldwide. Knowing whether indicators can [...]
Emerging Applications of Large Language Models in Ecology and Conservation Science
Published: 2025-11-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) marks a major development in artificial intelligence, with potentially transformative implications for ecology and conservation science. Built on advanced deep-learning architectures, these models can support a wide range of tasks, from analysing unstructured texts to enhancing biodiversity monitoring and generating policy-relevant insights. This [...]
Natural Heritage: A Teaching Game For Biodiversity Conservation
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Higher Education
The potential for computer games to serve as effective learning and teaching tools is now widely acknowledged. Here, we present ‘Natural Heritage’, an educational turn-based strategy game about biodiversity conservation. In it, the player takes on the role of an elected policy maker who has to balance ecological and economic targets while managing regional land use. The game aims to teach key [...]
Going with, or going to the dogs: City Serenade of Multispecies Survival
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Human Ecology, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Population Biology, Urban Studies and Planning, Zoology
1. As tropical cities rapidly urbanise, multispecies coexistence faces unprecedented challenges. Ground-dwelling (dogs), arboreal (macaques), and aerial (black kites) urban commensals navigate complex social-ecological systems shaped by anthropogenic resource provisioning, cultural practices, and architectural constraints. Despite escalating human-animal conflicts—20 million annual dog bites in [...]
Beneath the Pavement: Understanding mycorrhizal fungi in urban ecosystems and the path forward
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Studies, Human Ecology, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Urban expansion is reshaping ecosystems worldwide, yet the responses of mycorrhizal fungi—key mediators of plant–soil interactions—remain poorly understood. In this review, we synthesize current knowledge on the environmental and ecological factors shaping mycorrhizal fungal diversity, distribution, and function in cities. We highlight how greenspace and landscape features—including plant [...]
A theoretical framework for multispecies coexistence in large herbivores based on functional traits and dietary data
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Modern Coexistence Theory (MCT) has long aimed to predict community structure, but empirical support remains scattered across unconnected case-studies from a narrow subset of systems where it is possible to quantify niche and fitness differences (e.g., pairwise interactions between fast-growing plants or protists). We sought a framework to apply MCT to a broader range of ecological scenarios by [...]
Automated insect monitoring with camera traps is transforming ecological understanding
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Addressing global declines in insect biodiversity requires both ecological restoration and high-quality monitoring data. While long-term participatory schemes have been foundational, recent advances in automated recording and AI-based identification offer transformative but undocumented potential. Here, we show how leveraging insect camera traps, deep learning models and statistics drives a [...]
SEICAT+: a comprehensive assessment framework for positive socio-economic impacts of alien species
Published: 2025-10-20
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Economics, Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Demography, Population, and Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Despite their recognized harms to humans and biodiversity, alien species outside of domestication/cultivation can also provide socio-economic benefits, which are essential to consider when identifying stakeholder conflicts and informing managers and policymakers. These benefits often result from the enhancement of ecosystem services, such as the provision of food, timber, and other natural [...]