Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Co-producing biodiversity data infrastructures: Mexico’s Agrobiodiversity Information System as a case study
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Science and Technology Studies
Agrobiodiversity data, rooted in place and in community, expose tensions around sustaining the involvement of data collectors across the data lifecycle and embedding their context-specific expertise as data are mobilized beyond their sites of origin. These challenges extend to biodiversity data infrastructures that integrate diverse socio-ecological information. We examine how a co-production [...]
Cave spider trophic dynamics, network structure and competition: cave zone, taxonomy and bat presence drive hypogean interactions
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology
Cave ecosystems are shaped by unique environmental constraints, influencing species distributions and trophic interactions. Spiders are often the dominant predators in caves, but their diet is restricted by local parameters that likely intensify competition and other intraguild interactions, including the confinement of energy flows to detrital and chemoautotrophic pathways. The hypogean [...]
Evaluating AI agents on the IUCN Red List assessor exam: Tradeoffs and opportunities for AI assistants in extinction risk assessments
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Computer Sciences
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is the world's most widely used system for assessing the global extinction risk of species, underpinning conservation policy and action worldwide. However, due to funding constraints and limited assessor capacity, the Red List faces significant gaps in species coverage (less than 20% of plant species have been assessed) and challenges in keeping assessments [...]
Recognising patterns of vulnerability in a seagrass-dependent social-ecological system to support place-based management
Published: 2026-11-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Human Geography, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Seagrass social-ecological systems are increasingly demonstrated to contribute to the well-being, livelihood opportunities and local economies of millions of people across coastlines globally. Seagrasses are also recognised for supporting endangered, culturally significant biodiversity and fisheries species. In the Palk Bay, Tamil Nadu region of southern India, we use a vulnerability framework to [...]
The spatial dynamics of nutrient limitation in communities of generalist predators of crop pests
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Nutrition, Zoology
Generalist arthropod predators vitally control crop pests, but their ability to perform this role relies on them obtaining sufficient nutrients within simplified crop environments. Field margins are thought to provide habitat and resources for predators, such as ground beetles, but how far into fields this provision extends is poorly understood. Since arthropod nutrient contents can vary [...]
A targeted metacollection of Nordic gardens reveals horticultural endemism of threatened woody plants
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany
There is huge potential for bringing together international networks of Botanic Gardens and Arboreta and pooling their resources for coordinated action to conserve threatened species. Realising this potential requires effectively managing complex, largely independently acquired data for tens of thousands of species and many more individual plants with different wild or cultivated origins. Here we [...]
Genomic costs without functional consequences in short-range endemics trapped in evolutionary refugia
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Evolution, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics
Species with small geographic ranges are often concentrated in evolutionary refugia, landscapes that support viable populations through significant climate oscillations. Under long-term stable environments and with small population size, species are predicted to evolve narrow climatic tolerances, lose genetic diversity and accumulate harmful mutations. Together, these predictions suggest that [...]
Mapping actor diversity is essential for advancing global seagrass conservation
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Human Geography, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Seagrass conservation is increasingly organised around global agendas for protection, restoration, climate mitigation, biodiversity recovery and nature-positive finance. The actor systems that determine whether these agendas succeed remain poorly described, if at all. We developed a heuristic actor-centred framework for seagrass social-ecological systems, combining a literature scan with [...]
Discrepancies between climate velocity and dispersal capacity threaten subalpine forests in Northern Italy
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Plant Sciences
The acceleration of anthropogenic warming is fundamentally altering the climatic space available to foundational conifer species in European alpine environments. This study evaluates the potential impacts of future climate scenarios on the spatial distribution and elevational displacement of four key taxa (Abies alba, Larix decidua, Picea abies, and Pinus sylvestris) in the Italian Alps. We [...]
How Much of the Forest Do Citizen Scientists Actually Record? A Decade of iNaturalist Sampling in the Hyrcanian Forests
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Sciences
Citizen-science records increasingly inform biodiversity research and conservation planning, yet how much of a large forest they actually cover is rarely measured. We analyzed 1,700 research-grade iNaturalist records from the Hyrcanian Forest, northern Iran (2015–2025), on a 10 × 10 km grid, comparing observed coverage with null models. Annual records rose from 48 to 386, but occupied only 43.7% [...]
Noise as a global change driver: a meta-analysis of its fitness consequences for birds
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health
Anthropogenic noise is a widespread yet underappreciated global pollutant. Despite mounting evidence that noise may affect the physiology and behaviour of birds, its consequences for fitness, and thus its capacity to impact population and evolutionary processes, remain unclear. Here, we conduct a pre-registered systematic review and meta-analysis of the causal effects of anthropogenic noise on [...]
Spatial crime scripting and meso-level analyses of illegal pangolin trade
Published: 2026-10-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Human-related threats such as poaching and illegal trade remain the dominant risk to pangolin conservation. Using crime science focused on illegal pangolin hunting, we compare expert vs. community member’s spatio-temporal knowledge about the different stages of pangolin poaching and trade process at a national scale; explore spatial trajectories between stages; and explore spatial predictors of [...]
Oak gall wasps lack conserved microbial symbionts
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Herbivorous insects frequently rely on microbial partners to exploit their host plants, yet for gall-inducing insect taxa, there were few attempts to comprehensively resolve their microbial associations. To address this gap, we characterised microbial abundance, composition and specificity in three Polish populations of cherry oak gall wasps (Cynips quercusfolii), a highly specialized [...]
From Temperate to Boreal -- Untangling the Importance of Environment, Space, and Species Co-distributions in Forest Plant Distributions
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim Quantify how environmental conditions, spatial autocorrelation, and species co-distributions shape forest plant community at regional scale. Location Southern Québec, Canada, between the 45th and 53rd parallels. Period From 1986 to 2000. Major taxa studied Vascular plants, mosses, and lichens. Methods We analyzed the presence-absence of 224 plant species across 28,210 ecological observation [...]
Beyond static species distribution models: temporally dynamic, spatially nested models reduce extrapolation for future projections
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology
Species distribution models are widely used to project biodiversity responses to climate change, but geographically restricted training data can truncate species’ climatic niches, increasing reliance on extrapolation. Spatially nested models can reduce this truncation by incorporating climatic information from species’ wider distributions. However, how accounting for interannual environmental [...]