Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Rebuilding Diversity in the Anthropocene
Published: 2025-10-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Rapid changes driven by the Anthropocene—including shifts in climate, nutrients, habitats, and species composition—are causing severe biodiversity loss while creating new ecological opportunities. The balance between short-term ecological shifts in realized niches and long-term evolutionary changes in fundamental niches determines diversification. In the Anthropocene, however, this balance is [...]
A Typology of Corporate Actions for a Nature-Positive Future
Published: 2025-10-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Sustainability
Reaching the global goal of halting and reversing biodiversity loss will require a step-change in corporate action. Whilst clear guidance already exists for companies to take responsibility for and mitigate biodiversity loss caused by their own operations, delivering global nature-positive outcomes requires higher ambition and extended accountability for impacts beyond companies’ direct control. [...]
Ecosystem structure can affect human health: a longitudinal study on Green Prescriptions
Published: 2025-10-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Health Psychology, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
The role of Nature in supporting human life, health, and well-being has been recognized and appreciated since ancient times and has recently undergone scientific investigation, which highlighted the human dependence on Nature to nurture mental and physical health. Among Nature-based interventions that aim at exposing people to the natural environment, Green Prescriptions (GRx) represent a [...]
Ciclos irregulares de financiamento no Brasil são uma barreira à conservação da biodiversidade e à liderança global do país
Published: 2025-10-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
O financiamento estável para a pesquisa científica é fundamental para a conservação da biodiversidade e a formulação de políticas baseadas em evidências. No Brasil, ciclos inconsistentes de financiamento para bolsas contribuem para a fuga de cérebros de Pesquisadores em Início de Carreira (ECRs, do inglês “Early Career Researchers”), que poderiam impulsionar avanços significativos na pesquisa em [...]
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 [...]
Extensive climate-induced range shifts in butterflies across the globe
Published: 2025-09-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ongoing global change is leading to the widespread redistribution of species1,2. Assessments of shifts in species geographic ranges, however, remain taxonomically biased and geographically limited2, especially for insects. We conducted a global synthesis on butterfly range shifts using a combination of multi-lingual review in 15 languages and expert assessments, compiling data on range shifts for [...]
Native bee genus diversity within bee-friendly urban gardens varies little along an urbanization gradient
Published: 2025-09-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Urban bee populations are threatened by ongoing habitat loss and fragmentation. Bee-friendly gardens with abundant forage and nesting resources may help offset these pressures, but attributes of the broader urban landscape could also play an important role. We explored bee diversity within 32 bee-friendly gardens distributed throughout the city of Kelowna, British Columbia. Our objectives were to [...]
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 [...]
Building bridges between ecological and economic agent-based models of agriculture
Published: 2025-09-26
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies
Agriculture is a complex social-ecological system with numerous interactions and feedbacks between policies, markets, farm management, landscapes, and ecosystems. Because of these interconnections, policy changes, societal trends, and environmental crises can have widespread knock-on effects that threaten the stability of the entire system. Agent-based models have become a valuable tool used for [...]
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 [...]
GhostNetZero: AI for Detecting Marine Ghost Nets
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Marine Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Sustainability
Abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gears (ALDFG), commonly referred to as ghost nets, pose a persistent global threat to marine biodiversity. Constructed from durable synthetic polymers, ghost nets remain intact for decades, continuing to entangle and kill marine organisms while damaging habitats and imposing economic burdens on fisheries and coastal communities. Despite their [...]
A Unified and Predictive Measure of Functional Diversity
Published: 2025-09-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Despite the critical role of functional diversity (FD) in understanding ecological systems and processes, its robust quantification remains a significant challenge. A long-held view in the field is that it is not possible to capture its three facets---functional richness, functional divergence, and functional evenness---in a single index. This perspective has prompted recent proposals for FD [...]
What defines an urban butterfly? Life history traits and habitat associations of butterflies in urban environments
Published: 2025-09-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Urban areas are encroaching onto semi-natural areas the world over, driving species assemblages into homogenisation. A better understanding of the life history and habitat association traits can help support management efforts to improve urban biodiversity. Urban areas present an ecological filter, limiting the number of species present compared to the wider countryside. What characteristics help [...]
Vendi Information Gain for Active Learning and its Application to Ecology
Published: 2025-09-14
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity
While monitoring biodiversity through camera traps has become an important endeavor for ecological research, identifying species in the captured image data remains a major bottleneck due to limited labeling resources. Active learning—a machine learning paradigm that selects the most informative data to label and train a predictive model—offers a promising solution, but typically focuses on [...]
Rediscovering lost Cenozoic tree diversity in Western and Central Europe
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Management, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Paleoclimatic changes during the late Cenozoic led to substantial losses of tree diversity in Western and Central Europe. A complete overview of what taxa were lost, the timing of these losses, and their implications for the adaptation of the region’s forest ecosystems to ongoing climate change is needed. Here, we compiled a dataset of fossil occurrences of tree genera from Western and Central [...]