Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Assessing direct effects of insect change on insectivore populations in the United Kingdom
Published: 2025-07-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
1. Declines in insect abundance are a cause for concern, with potential downstream impacts on the function of ecosystems. Insects are key food resources for insectivorous vertebrates, with evidence that declines in these species could be driven by changing insect abundance. 2. Quantifying the direct effect of insect abundance on vertebrate population dynamics is challenging especially at large [...]
Cover crops influence aboveground and belowground invertebrates in farmlands
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1. Maintaining vegetation diversity through cover crops could counteract the decreasing soil carbon and biodiversity in intensive monoculture farming, but its impacts on fauna have rarely been quantified. 2. To investigate how cover crops influence the abundance and trophic structure of invertebrates, or inorganic N (proxy of soil functioning), barley (Hordeum vulgare) was grown with up to eight [...]
Social-ecological networks in urban ecology research
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Urban Studies and Planning
Urban ecosystems are complex and dynamic, shaped by feedback loops between social and ecological components. However, urban ecology requires tools to unravel this complexity. Social-ecological networks (SENs) offer a conceptual and analytical framework by integrating network theory to understand the relationships between and within social-ecological systems. Here, we integrate perspectives from [...]
Six decades of losses and gains in alpha diversity of European plant communities
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Biodiversity change forecasts rely on long-term time series, but such data are often scarce in space and time. Here, we interpolated spatiotemporal changes in species richness using a novel machine learning method without requiring temporal replication at sites. Using 698,692 one-time survey vegetation plots, we estimated trends in vascular plant alpha diversity across Europe from 1960 to 2020 [...]
A comprehensive dataset on pollinator diversity, visitation rates, individual-based traits, and pollination success across four plant species in an urban garden experiment
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
This dataset presents flower visitation frequency, pollinator richness, and direct measures of pollination success for four focal plant species from a field experiment in 24 home gardens in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. The home gardens were selected to vary independently in local flowering species richness and the proportion of impervious surface in a 500-m radius around the garden, a common [...]
Genetic evidence for the rediscovery in the wild of the critically endangered Sahara killifish Apricaphanius saourensis (Cyprinodontiformes: Aphaniidae)
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Zoology
Apricaphanius saourensis was described in 2006 from the Saoura River in western Algeria, and is currently listed as possibly extinct in the wild. We recently discovered an aphaniid population in a very isolated secondary wadi of the Guir River about 115 Km northwest of A. saourensis’ type locality, which we hypothesized could belong to A. saourensis based on images taken from living individuals. [...]
Strategic conservation of tropical insects
Published: 2025-07-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Insect species are declining globally, yet they are often overlooked in biodiversity conservation measures. The tropics harbour > 80% of all insect species; however, information on their ecology and conservation status is largely lacking. It is imperative to identify solutions to the issues of data availability and integration of scientific findings with conservation policy for tropical [...]
Unveiling the spatial link between geodiversity and biodiversity: a multi-taxon study in the South of France
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Context: Addressing global environmental challenges requires an integrative conservation approach that spans multiple taxonomic groups and trophic levels. The "Conserving Nature’s Stage" (CNS) strategy promotes the protection of geodiversity -abiotic heterogeneity of the Earth’s surface and subsurface- as an holistic metric for biodiversity and ecosystems conservation, yet its relationship with [...]
Hotspots, refuges, and rising risk: mapping tropical hunting pressure across space and time
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Hunting is a major driver of global extinctions, yet the spatial footprint and temporal trend of this pressure is lacking at global scale, limiting our ability to achieve international policy targets. Here, we present the first standardized global maps of hunting pressure across the tropics, based on a machine learning algorithm trained on 2,463 hunted and non-hunted tropical sites, spatially and [...]
Free-ranging dogs in the streets: foreseeing a multispecies coexistence crisis beyond shortsighted kindness or conflicts
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Coexistence solutions tout conflict mitigation goals for commensals and wildlife, often ignoring the lived multispecies entanglements. Tropical cities have become battlegrounds of misguided kindness and escalating conflicts with animals. Human niche expansion creates a paradox for free-ranging denizens: abundant food sources from waste, yet unprecedented ecological pressures from infrastructural [...]
Macroalgae morphological complexity affects the functional diversity of epifaunal annelid assemblages
Published: 2025-06-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Host structural complexity influences the diversity of associated epifaunal species, but its role in shaping functional trait diversity remains underexplored. We developed a trait-based framework to assess whether macroalgal structural complexity significantly influences the functional assembly of marine annelid epifauna in a sandstone reef system at Enseada dos Corais Beach (NE Brazil). Sampling [...]
Going Global by Going Local: Impacts and Opportunities of Geographically Focused Data Integration
Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Biodiversity conservation is a global challenge that requires the integration of global and local data. Expanding global data infrastructures have opened unprecedented opportunities for biodiversity data storage, curation, and dissemination. Within one such infrastructure – the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) – these benefits are achieved by aggregating data from over 100 regional [...]
Multiple global-change drivers and cascading effects in Mediterranean ecosystems: Lessons from an iconic national park
Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Historically, Mediterranean systems, particularly the Mediterranean Basin, have been substantially impacted by multiple regional-scale disturbances resulting from complex interactive effects of global-change drivers. However, such effects are typically studied on isolated groups of organisms, often disregarding how ecological processes such as biotic interactions affect ecosystem responses to [...]
Elevating the importance of Risk of Bias assessment for ecology and evolution
Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are key evidence synthesis methods informing research and policy. An assessment of the Risk of Bias (RoB) in included studies is normally considered an essential component of these. However, RoB assessment is rare in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), and tools from other fields are seldom adopted. To identify reasons for this limited uptake, we surveyed [...]
Characterising the structural complexity across major habitats of Tenerife, Spain
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences
Understanding biodiversity changes across ecosystems requires the consideration of various biodiversity dimensions, such as habitat structural complexity – the degree of heterogeneity in the distribution of plant material in three-dimensional space. Yet, its inclusion in long-term biodiversity monitoring on oceanic islands remains limited. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can be used to quantify [...]