Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
robust.prioritizr: Robust Systematic Conservation Prioritization
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Climate change poses significant threats to biodiversity. To ensure the long-term persistence of species, protected areas must be established in locations that will safeguard suitable habitats in the future. Although statistical models can predict where such habitats may occur under different future scenarios, designing protected areas that can effectively protect these habitats across a wide [...]
Body condition, but not reproductive success, is associated with sociality in a colonial seabird.
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Ornithology, Zoology
Body condition, breeding habitat quality and access to socially acquired information are generally associated with higher fitness in social animals. In colonial species that breed in dense aggregations, such as seabirds, the combined effects of these factors on reproductive success have rarely been tested together. In this study, we investigated the relationship between fledging success, body [...]
From Footprints to Handprints: Principles for Assessing an Organisation’s Positive Impacts on Biodiversity
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Biodiversity
Organisations are increasingly acknowledging their responsibility to ‘bend the curve of biodiversity loss’ by reducing negative biodiversity impacts, often referred to as biodiversity footprints. A growing number of organisations are also interested in highlighting the positive impacts they have on biodiversity, driven by research, innovation and lobbying, for example. Limited guidance currently [...]
When does modelling dependence change the target of biodiversity indicators?
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Biodiversity
Recent biodiversity trend analyses have modelled uncertainty arising from temporal, spatial and phylogenetic dependence. For descriptive indicators such as the Living Planet Index (LPI) however, a prior question is whether dependence modelling improves estimation of a fixed quantity or risks changing the quantity being reported. Using the high-profile case of Johnson et al. (2024), the current [...]
Parasitic zoosporic eufungi: taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity, ecology, and impacts
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Parasitology, Plant Pathology
Zoosporic eufungi (i.e., chytrids, sensu lato) comprise a phylogenetically and ecologically diverse guild of early diverging fungal phyla (Chytridiomycota, Monoblepharomycota, Neocallimastigomycota, Blastocladiomycota, Sanchytriomycota, Aphelidiomycota, Cryptomycota/Rozellomycota, and Olpidiomycota). While most circumscribed zoosporic eufungi function as decomposers of recalcitrant materials, [...]
History, challenges, and opportunities in the study of entomopathogenic fungi in tropical regions: Borneo as a model ecosystem
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Fungal pathogens tend to have a poor reputation as a disease among the general public and policy-makers. However, entomopathogenic fungi, adapted to infect and kill arthropod hosts, play a wide range of roles in ecosystems, provide key ecosystem services, and offer interesting models to understand pathogen interaction networks. Tropical regions provide especially favorable conditions for [...]
Towards integrating interaction networks into global parasite conservation: insights from bats, bat flies and their fungal associates
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Parasites are a key conservation blind spot. Even though parasitism is a widespread ecological lifestyle, most parasite diversity remains unknown, as do the interactions in which they are involved. Some parasite species are involved in multitrophic interactions, meaning they span multiple trophic levels. These complex interactions are generally understudied, and conservation frameworks fail to [...]
Projecting the vertical disassembly of the bumble bee pollination network of the Southern Rocky Mountains
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Climate warming and land-use change are reshuffling the distribution of life on Earth. This change is altering the structure of species interaction networks, which ultimately enable the persistence of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Forecasting change in species interactions is a central challenge for biodiversity conservation, but there are numerous methodological challenges associated with [...]
Blitz the Gap: a nation-wide effort to guide citizen science toward the needs of biodiversity science
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
To resolve persistent biases in conservation assessments and forecasting, we urgently need more systematic collection of biodiversity data. Citizen (or, community) science, despite its reputation for unstructured data, offers a particularly promising path forward, mobilizing participation at scales and speeds unmatched by traditional monitoring. Here, we introduce Blitz the Gap, a pan-Canadian [...]
A data-driven assessment of the global community structure of pelagic zooplankton biomass
Published: 2026-06-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Statistical Models
Aim: Zooplankton often dominate pelagic metazoan biomass, making them a central component of marine ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles. In this study, we aimed to: (1) provide biomass distributions of zooplankton functional types to support marine ecosystem monitoring and biogeochemical model evaluation; and (2) investigate regional and seasonal patterns of biomass across marine zooplankton [...]
EntoScan and BEEomass: a standardized imaging system and a physically motivated model for high-throughput dry biomass estimation of arthropods
Published: 2026-06-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Computational Biology, Computational Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Entomology
Computer vision and AI are now widely used for automated insect classification, but their potential for estimating other traits, such as biomass, is not yet fully explored. Insect biomass is a key measure of ecosystem function, informing ecosystem services, food webs, and environmental change. It is also used to track population trends and estimate the contribution of insects to ecosystem carbon. [...]
Tree species richness effects on pre-dispersal seed predation are mediated by tree fruit type
Published: 2026-06-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Forest BEF experiments are only now reaching a stage at which natural tree regeneration can be studied, offering new opportunities to understand how biodiversity shapes trophic interactions during early demographic filtering. Here, we quantified seed productivity and insect-mediated pre-dispersal seed predation on 12 tree species across a tree species richness gradient from 1 to 16 in the [...]
An action-oriented research agenda for equitable and meaningful nature-based solutions in urban areas
Published: 2026-06-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Public Health, Urban Studies and Planning
Nature-based solutions provide opportunities to address the urgent, interconnected global challenges of environmental conservation, public health, and social justice in urban areas. Despite growing interest among policy-makers, the outcomes of nature-based solutions at the nexus of biodiversity, human health, and social justice are not well understood. We gathered a group of experts from [...]
Symbiont interactions bias measures of arthropod biodiversity
Published: 2026-06-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology
Although arthropods comprise the majority of all named species, their biodiversity is relatively understudied. Here, we highlight how interactions between arthropods and their bacterial symbionts can pose challenges for biodiversity research, especially for estimating taxonomic, functional, and genetic diversity. We also argue that recent technological developments and biomonitoring schemes [...]
Computable Nature Dependency in a Watershed Knowledge Graph
Published: 2026-06-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Systems Biology
Resolving nature-related financial risk and watershed resilience requires a representational shift from opaque, aggregate indices to auditable, mechanistic pathways. Current natural-capital workflows often succumb to an "epistemic collapse", where granular ecological interactions are erased in favor of sector-level proxies or spatial heatmaps that lack a downstream asset trace. Here, we present a [...]