Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
The Global Biodiversity Framework supports global assessment of One Health actions
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences, Public Health
The One Health approach promotes collaboration across disciplines to enhance the health of humans, animals, plants, and the environment. Recently developed by the Quadripartite organizations, the One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022-2026) supports countries in adopting the One Health approach through six action tracks. The tracks address multiple aspects of biodiversity, containing guiding [...]
Making use of oak genomes
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Genomics, Life Sciences
This review summarizes the contributions of genomics to our understanding of oak evolution and management, both past and ongoing. Far from being exhaustive given the large number of publications following the publication of the genomes, this review emphasizes work conducted in the decade following publication of the first two complete oak genome assemblies, and major findings and achievements [...]
Nature finance: we need (some) offsets
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies
Nature offsets – mechanisms that allow for negative environmental impacts (e.g. biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions) to be fully compensated for and neutralized – are extremely widespread, but have become increasingly controversial, to the extent they are now starting to be precluded from new environmental policy developments. In turn, leaders are becoming more reticent about their [...]
Harnessing hidden synergies in conservation planning: do “umbrella action plans” reduce redundancy and improve efficiency?
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity
Conservation Action Plans (APs) are widely used to guide biodiversity interventions, but they are often developed in isolation, leading to redundancy and poorly coordinated implementation. We assess whether identifying thematic overlap among APs can reveal practical opportunities for coordination, and introduce the concept of Umbrella Action Plans (UAPs) as a framework to streamline conservation [...]
A Game-Theoretic and Dynamical-Systems Framework for Anti-Poaching Resource Allocation: A Case Study of Etosha National Park
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology
Wildlife poaching threatens biodiversity across sub-Saharan Africa, and is especially acute for critically endangered species such as the black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis). Etosha National Park, Namibia (22,935 km²), is patrolled by approximately 295 anti-poaching rangers—fewer than 0.02 per km²—posing two interlinked operational questions: where should a limited workforce be placed to maximise [...]
OdoCocktail-Japan: Primer sets to enrich environmental DNA of Japanese Odonata species
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Monitoring is essential to conserve and recover biodiversity. Environmental DNA (eDNA)-based metabarcoding analysis has been recognized as a cost-effective and efficient method to monitor species, but it still has limitations, such as insufficient reference databases and lack of primer sets suitable to detect target species. As biological indicators of freshwater habitats, Odonata species have [...]
Robustness of pesticide and other environmental stressors as key drivers of stream macroinvertebrates in small agricultural catchments
Published: 2026-05-09
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Robustness of multiple stressor rankings is essential for credible ecotoxicological assessments and policy guidance. A widely cited study of 101 small agricultural streams across Germany identified pesticide mixtures as the dominant stressor for stream macroinvertebrates, but its analytical robustness has since been questioned. Using a fully reproducible workflow, we reanalysed this dataset to [...]
Optimizing sampling and monitoring of species interactions within Biodiversity Observation Networks
Published: 2026-05-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Optimal monitoring strategies should be designed to efficiently monitor all essential facets of biodiversity. Yet, species interactions are often overlooked in monitoring designs compared to spatial coverage and species richness, partly due to the inherent difficulty of sampling and monitoring interactions compared to species distributions. Here, we used simulations to test the efficiency of [...]
Assessing the sensitivity and robustness of the Living Planet Index through simulated population dynamics: strengths, stability, and challenges
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Understanding population change through time is crucial for effective conservation of biodiversity. The Living Planet Index (LPI) is a key indicator for tracking global species abundance trends under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, offering a picture of population change over time. However, the sensitivity of the index to zero values or to the number of missing values in time [...]
The evolutionary link between food, condiments and medicine
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Anthropology, Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Food Science, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The deep relationship between humans and plants is of great interest to ethnobotanists, human ecologists, and evolutionary biologists. Humans have incorporated thousands of plant species into both traditional medicine and our diets, as foods and condiments. Many of these provide not only calories but also micronutrients and other bioactive compounds that contribute to health [1]. The boundaries [...]
A Functionally Integrated Symbiotic System as a Mechanism for Angiosperm Diversification
Published: 2026-05-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Plant Sciences, Systems Biology
Flowering plants have maintained exceptionally high diversity for over 100 million years, yet the mechanisms enabling sustained macroevolutionary diversification remain unresolved. Classical theory predicts a trade-off between speciation and extinction, but angiosperms have repeatedly diversified while persisting across heterogeneous environments. Mutualistic interactions, pollination, seed [...]
Functional diversity of tundra vascular plants over space and time
Published: 2026-04-28
Subjects: Biodiversity
Aim: Rapid warming across the tundra biome is driving widespread changes in vascular plant community composition. While species turnover is well-documented, the ramifications for tundra functional diversity are unknown. Here, we quantify biome-scale spatial gradients and temporal trends in the functional diversity of tundra vegetation for the first time. Location: A biome-scale synthesis of in [...]
Representational limits in detecting ecological change
Published: 2026-04-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Biotechnology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Food Science, Forest Sciences, Genetics and Genomics, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Other Life Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Physiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Systems Biology
Detecting ecological change remains a persistent challenge, even in systems with extensive monitoring data and increasingly sophisticated analytical tools. Uncertainty is usually attributed to stochasticity, limited observations, or imperfect models. Here, I argue that an additional and largely overlooked constraint arises from representational limits: systematic ways in which graphs, indicators, [...]
Autonomous biodiversity credits on the horizon?
Published: 2026-04-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Biodiversity credits are being pushed as a means to fund nature conservation. Much of the debate around credits has concerned additionality, leakage, and permanence, and the extent to which biodiversity can be captured in an individual unit. As AI models continue to develop, however, technology could create a new kind of loss-of-control problem for biodiversity credits. In this Perspective, we [...]
First record of Poa cf. annua on Fildes Peninsula (King George Island), a major human-access node in Antarctica
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems are highly species-poor and particularly vulnerable to biological invasions. Poa annua L. is the only non-native flowering plant known to have established a persistent, self-sustaining population in Antarctica, with confirmed occurrences on King George Island near the H. Arctowski Polish Antarctic Station and the Ecology Glacier forefield. Here we report a new [...]