Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
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 [...]
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 [...]
As open as possible, as protected as necessary: Proportionate governance for environmental DNA under the BBNJ Agreement
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Environmental Law, Marine Biology, Molecular Genetics
The Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement) establishes new arrangements for activities involving marine genetic resources and the sharing of resulting benefits. Direct pathways to resource utilisation are most apparent in conventional genetic workflows where whole organisms or tissues are collected [...]
Gaps and biases in the ecological evidence underlying global biodiversity impact assessments
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1. Halting global biodiversity loss requires methods that link biodiversity impacts to both their direct drivers and the human activities that generate them. Biodiversity footprint assessment has emerged as a key framework for establishing these connections, resulting in the rapid development of diverse methods and applications. Central to these approaches are characterisation factors (CFs), [...]
Vert-NSM: neural shape models for shape completion, classification, and landmark-free morphometrics of vertebrate specimens
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Biodiversity
Natural history museums are building digital 3D archives at a scale that enables geometric morphometric analysis across thousands of specimens. Landmark-based analyses depend on anatomical priors and often exclude unidentified and incomplete specimens, which are abundant in collections and the fossil record. Continuous shape representations offer a landmark-free alternative that can be combined [...]
Genetic diversity must underpin area-based conservation and restoration targets
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Policy, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
The mid-term review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework reveals highly uneven progress in halting biodiversity loss, especially for genetic diversity (Target 4) which underpins ecosystem function and species’ adaptive potential in a changing environment (Des Roches et al., 2018). Over 70% of the Parties have set national targets to conserve and restore genetic diversity, yet, so [...]
Synergistic phenology and range shifts in boreal butterflies are controlled by species' overall response capacity
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Population Biology
Species track climate warming through shifts in both phenology and geographic distributions, but the strength of association between these responses remains poorly understood. Although recent research points to a tendency of species to shift across either the temporal or spatial gradient, there is no comprehensive understanding of how generalizable these phenology and range shifts are and whether [...]
The role of long-distance dispersal for community dynamics of fungi
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Population Biology
Realized dispersal ability of wind-dispersing fungi in natural conditions remains poorly understood. Here, we study how climate, habitat type and long-distance dispersal jointly structure fungal communities and how their effects vary between species that have different morphological and life history traits. We integrate global fungal (spores and other organismal material) occurrence data [...]
The Doñana Digital Twin: integrating heterogeneous data into iterative, mechanistically grounded forecasts of biodiversity change
Published: 2026-10-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Integrative Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Natural ecosystems are increasingly impacted by multiple global-change drivers, and these impacts propagate non-linearly from individuals to populations and to communities. To anticipate ecological change under such complexities and mitigate negative impacts, we require integrated, mechanistically-grounded approaches to prediction. For mitigation strategies to be adaptive, predictions must also [...]
Shelterbelts: A Python library for characterising farmland tree groups and their influence on nearby pasture and cropland
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Shelterbelts is an open source Python library for mapping and categorising groups of trees in agricultural landscapes, and the corresponding shelter provided to nearby pixels based on the wind direction or density of tree cover. Starting from a binary tree raster, pixels are labelled into ecologically meaningful categories based on their structure and location including: scattered trees, forest [...]
Understanding the Global Report on Collective Progress in the Implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: Purpose, Content, and Science-Policy Engagement
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), establishes four long-term 2050 goals, 23 action-oriented 2030 targets, and a standardized monitoring framework to track collective progress. The 2026 global review marks the first operational test of the Party-led planning, monitoring, reporting, and review (PMRR) mechanism, [...]
Estimated Time to Act: A Global Assessment of Biodiversity Exposure to Human Modification
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Spatial Science
Biodiversity loss is accelerating under compounding human pressures, yet most conservation tools quantify the pressure species already face, rather than when it will push them beyond the levels they have experienced. This temporal blind spot limits proactive planning, particularly under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which sets action-oriented targets for 2030 and [...]
Spatial variation in keystone predation on foundation species drives local and landscape- scale diversity patterns
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The proposition that keystone predators increase biodiversity has been criticized for failing to consider the species facilitated by, rather than outcompeted by, dominant prey. Here, we revisit the relationship between the original keystone species, Pisaster ochraceus, and the diversity of rocky intertidal communities inclusive of competitively dominant prey, competitively subordinate [...]
Large Language Models for Marine Protected Area Design and Management Planning
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Natural Resources and Conservation
Achieving biodiversity targets requires advances in marine conservation planning and action. We make three arguments about large language models (LLMs): they add more value when embedded within decision-support systems; they integrate fragmented expertise, data, and tools; they can increase capacity in under-resourced settings through co-design. We illustrate these arguments with a conceptual [...]