Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Screwworm re-emergence, illegal cattle movements, and emerging risks to wildlife and protected areas in Mesoamerica
Published: 2025-07-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Diseases, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Parasitic Diseases, Parasitology, Public Health, Veterinary Preventive Medicine, Epidemiology, and Public Health
New World Screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax), eradicated from North and Central America through decades of Sterile Insect Technique programs, has re-emerged across Mesoamerica with alarming speed. Following a surge in Panama in 2023, the parasite spread northward through Central America, reaching Mexico by late 2024. Nearly 100,000 domestic animal cases and hundreds of human cases have since [...]
Trade-offs between nature and people across Ethiopia’s protected area network demonstrate challenges in translating global conservation targets into national realities
Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Nutrition
Achieving global biodiversity targets, such as the commitment to conserve 30% of the planet by 2030, depends on the ability of individual countries to translate targets into reality. While there has long been recognition that protected areas can bring costs as well as benefits, the implications of this for delivery of the global target have not been fully explored. We focus on Ethiopia, a country [...]
What's really happening on the Barro Colorado Island 50 ha forest plot?
Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Over the decades, Barro Colorado Island (BCI) has incubated major conceptual and empirical advances in ecology. For example, the theoretical zero-sum multinomial (ZSM), log series, and Poisson log normal (PLN) models have been used to describe abundance distributions and quantify diversity in the BCI 50 ha forest plot. 2. A new model called the compound exponential-geometric series (CEGS) [...]
Rediscovery and Habitat Assessment of the Endemic Philippine Medaka (Oryzias luzonensis) in Northern Luzon
Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
The endemic Philippine medaka Oryzias luzonensis, confined to the Laoag (Padsan) watershed in Ilocos Norte, Northern Luzon, had not been recorded in the wild for over 40 years, prompting its classification as Endangered by the IUCN in 2021. Field surveys conducted from January to May 2024 across six sites using traditional push nets successfully rediscovered the species in three Solsona [...]
Assessing direct effects of insect change on insectivore populations in the United Kingdom
Published: 2025-07-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
1. Declines in insect abundance are a cause for concern, with potential downstream impacts on the function of ecosystems. Insects are key food resources for insectivorous vertebrates, with evidence that declines in these species could be driven by changing insect abundance. 2. Quantifying the direct effect of insect abundance on vertebrate population dynamics is challenging especially at large [...]
Cover crops influence aboveground and belowground invertebrates in farmlands
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1. Maintaining vegetation diversity through cover crops could counteract the decreasing soil carbon and biodiversity in intensive monoculture farming, but its impacts on fauna have rarely been quantified. 2. To investigate how cover crops influence the abundance and trophic structure of invertebrates, or inorganic N (proxy of soil functioning), barley (Hordeum vulgare) was grown with up to eight [...]
Social-ecological networks in urban ecology research
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Urban Studies and Planning
Urban ecosystems are complex and dynamic, shaped by feedback loops between social and ecological components. However, urban ecology requires tools to unravel this complexity. Social-ecological networks (SENs) offer a conceptual and analytical framework by integrating network theory to understand the relationships between and within social-ecological systems. Here, we integrate perspectives from [...]
Six decades of losses and gains in alpha diversity of European plant communities
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Biodiversity change forecasts rely on long-term time series, but such data are often scarce in space and time. Here, we interpolated spatiotemporal changes in species richness using a novel machine learning method without requiring temporal replication at sites. Using 698,692 one-time survey vegetation plots, we estimated trends in vascular plant alpha diversity across Europe from 1960 to 2020 [...]
A comprehensive dataset on pollinator diversity, visitation rates, individual-based traits, and pollination success across four plant species in an urban garden experiment
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
This dataset presents flower visitation frequency, pollinator richness, and direct measures of pollination success for four focal plant species from a field experiment in 24 home gardens in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. The home gardens were selected to vary independently in local flowering species richness and the proportion of impervious surface in a 500-m radius around the garden, a common [...]
Genetic evidence for the rediscovery in the wild of the critically endangered Sahara killifish Apricaphanius saourensis (Cyprinodontiformes: Aphaniidae)
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Zoology
Apricaphanius saourensis was described in 2006 from the Saoura River in western Algeria, and is currently listed as possibly extinct in the wild. We recently discovered an aphaniid population in a very isolated secondary wadi of the Guir River about 115 Km northwest of A. saourensis’ type locality, which we hypothesized could belong to A. saourensis based on images taken from living individuals. [...]
Strategic conservation of tropical insects
Published: 2025-07-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Insect species are declining globally, yet they are often overlooked in biodiversity conservation measures. The tropics harbour > 80% of all insect species; however, information on their ecology and conservation status is largely lacking. It is imperative to identify solutions to the issues of data availability and integration of scientific findings with conservation policy for tropical [...]
Unveiling the spatial link between geodiversity and biodiversity: a multi-taxon study in the South of France
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Context: Addressing global environmental challenges requires an integrative conservation approach that spans multiple taxonomic groups and trophic levels. The "Conserving Nature’s Stage" (CNS) strategy promotes the protection of geodiversity -abiotic heterogeneity of the Earth’s surface and subsurface- as an holistic metric for biodiversity and ecosystems conservation, yet its relationship with [...]
Hotspots, refuges, and rising risk: mapping tropical hunting pressure across space and time
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Hunting is a major driver of global extinctions, yet the spatial footprint and temporal trend of this pressure is lacking at global scale, limiting our ability to achieve international policy targets. Here, we present the first standardized global maps of hunting pressure across the tropics, based on a machine learning algorithm trained on 2,463 hunted and non-hunted tropical sites, spatially and [...]
The Indian Street dog crisis and multispecies coexistence in tropical urban futures
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Cities in the Global South struggle with human-animal coexistence conundrums, e.g., in South Asia, old and new collide: people raise livestock informally and feed free-ranging animals within heterogeneously developed, juxtaposed patches. Digital economies boom amidst threats from waste piles linked with zoonotic diseases and conflicts, exemplified by the free-ranging dog crises in India. [...]
Macroalgae morphological complexity affects the functional diversity of epifaunal annelid assemblages
Published: 2025-06-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Host structural complexity influences the diversity of associated epifaunal species, but its role in shaping functional trait diversity remains underexplored. We developed a trait-based framework to assess whether macroalgal structural complexity significantly influences the functional assembly of marine annelid epifauna in a sandstone reef system at Enseada dos Corais Beach (NE Brazil). Sampling [...]