Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Stomatal responses of herbaceous plants to climate change since the 1800s: A case study using herbarium specimens
Published: 2026-09-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Background and Aims: As climate change accelerates, plants are expected to respond in myriad ways, such as shifting phenology or altering the density or size of stomata. Nonetheless, most studies to date have focused on just a single facet at a time. Methods: Here, we used herbarium specimens to examine stomatal responses to climate change in two perennial herbaceous species that have not [...]
mycoBaseCL: un catálogo actualizado de los hongos de Chile
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
El Reino Fungi constituye un grupo taxonómico megadiverso cuyas múltiples funciones ecosistémicas tienen repercusiones directas sobre el bienestar y desarrollo humano. Las bases de datos de biodiversidad resuelven la fragmentación de la información, existiendo en el contexto local compendios históricos sobre hongos de Chile desarrollados previamente. En los compendios de datos referidos se [...]
Audio embeddings identify novel sounds and track soundscape change within a tropical restoration landscape
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is increasingly being used over conventional biodiversity surveys because it is more cost-effective and implementable at a landscape level. However, the cheaper sensors that removed the barriers to PAM have now shifted the challenge from data collection to interpretation. Acoustic indices address this by condensing each recording into single summary statistics, [...]
Solar parks as an opportunity to jointly advance climate-change mitigation and biodiversity conservation
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations
Anthropogenic climate change is among the most pressing challenges for humanity making carbon-neutral energy production a top priority. Across the globe, solar energy is the single fastest growing energy source with solar parks covering more and more land surface area across many continents. The rise in solar energy production affects terrestrial biodiversity in the areas now occupied by solar [...]
Post-dispersal seed predation reflects tree species occurrence beyond local neighborhoods in a forest biodiversity experiment
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences
Post-dispersal seed predation is a key mechanism underlying Janzen-Connell (JC) effects with seed predation expected to decline with increasing distance from conspecific trees. However, the spatial scale at which seed predators respond to the occurrence of their resource tree species remains poorly understood. In particular, mobile consumers may respond to resource distributions beyond the local [...]
Designing optimal biodiversity observation networks
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Meeting the goals of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) requires a substantial increase in biodiversity monitoring effort, motivating the development of a Global Biodiversity Observing System (GBiOS). However, GBiOS cannot be built without a practical framework for designing effective biodiversity monitoring networks that balances budgetary constraints with competing policy objectives, which [...]
Environmental water management and H5 bird flu in waterbirds: Context and scenarios for decision-making
Published: 2026-09-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The impact of animal viruses has dramatically increased over the last decade globally, exemplified by the disruption caused by the recent panzootic of high pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b (H5 bird flu), which has caused the deaths of millions of wild birds and mammals, as well as domestic animals such as poultry. Wild waterbirds play a role in the spread of H5 bird flu [...]
A Sharma–Mittal Geometry of Evenness: Representation, Cardinal Resolution, and Relative Merits
Published: 2026-09-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The proliferation of evenness indices creates an interpretive problem whenever several admissible measures assign different numerical values to the same assemblage. We study that problem by normalizing Sharma–Mittal entropy to its maximum at complete uniformity. Written in terms of the Hill number of order α, the resulting surface is [...]
Do we need all of this research synthesis in ecology and conservation? A highly subjective criticism of reviews and meta-analyses
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Research synthesis, which includes systematic reviews and meta-analyses, provides applied ecologists and conservationists with big pictures of ecological processes and the effectiveness of conservation interventions. It can therefore hugely benefit applied ecology and conservation science. However, while in some areas of ecology and the conservation sciences study design, measurements and [...]
Time-lagged responses of soil biota are pervasive and require new approaches
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
When land-use changes, soil biodiversity is typically assumed to respond immediately. Nonetheless, soils are inherently slow systems. We argue that soil communities often remain in a transient state for decades to centuries, generating persistent ecological legacies. These lags can arise through two interacting mechanisms: environmental inertia, as the physical and chemical properties of soils [...]
Scenario-dependent functional connectivity in a crowded seascape: habitat suitability, shipping pressure and marine infrastructure in the North Sea
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Marine spatial planning increasingly needs seascape connectivity evidence to balance biodiversity conservation, offshore energy development and shipping. However, predicted functional connectivity depends strongly on how habitat suitability and human-use pressures are translated into resistance surfaces. This study tested how shipping and marine infrastructure alter HSM-derived connectivity [...]
A curated bioacoustics dataset of European bat vocalizations
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Acoustic surveys represent the primary method for monitoring bat populations and assessing their habitat use, yet reference recordings and associated metadata remain fragmented across repositories, recording programs, and private collections. We present ChirosetEurope, a curated dataset of European bat vocalizations (echolocation and social calls) assembled from multiple open repositories and [...]
Urban densification reduces food-web robustness despite partial gains through local habitat improvements
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Biodiversity
Urban densification is widely promoted to curb sprawl, yet the replacement of existing green infrastructure threatens species across multiple trophic levels. Species are embedded in complex food webs, and understanding how densification restructures urban food webs is essential for predicting functional change and evaluating whether local habitat improvements (e.g. greater vegetation diversity) [...]
Evidence and Uncertainty in the Future Pathways of Insects Under Global Change
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Insects are essential for life on Earth, yet anthropogenic environmental changes have led to declines in insect biomass, abundance, and species richness. Projecting future insect trajectories can inform conservation and policy but is complicated by variation in life histories and traits, nonlinear population dynamics, extreme population fluctuations, and interacting natural and anthropogenic [...]
ENCORE: the global infrastructure for screening business risks, dependencies and impacts on nature
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Biodiversity and ecosystem services provide the foundation on which the global economy, and by extension all businesses, depend. ENCORE (Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure) has established itself as a key reference for business and financial institution assessment of exposure to risk stemming from nature degradation. It has over 18,000 users, has been used in over 15 [...]