Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Understanding the dimensions and gaps in wildlife health surveillance for zoonotic risk management
Published: 2026-01-23
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Immunology and Infectious Disease
Following the Covid 19 pandemic, One Health has been a topic of increasing global awareness, with the development of various global strategies and action plans to manage and counteract risks as well as identify potential risks. However, despite these calls for action, little work has been conducted to establish a global baseline on policies related to One Health, particularly dealing with the [...]
Supporting wildlife movement amid the rise of border infrastructure
Published: 2026-01-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Law, Environmental Studies, Forest Management, Nature and Society Relations, Zoology
Transboundary areas of conservation importance affected by border infrastructure and militarization urgently need connectivity conservation solutions. Where human conflicts are ongoing and peace initiatives may be unviable, smaller-scale approaches can still be implemented. We propose a multi-faceted approach to support animal movement and minimize impacts of multiple border barriers on medium to [...]
The missing branches of the bee Tree of Life: addressing global Darwinian shortfalls and their drivers
Published: 2026-01-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding the Darwinian shortfall (i.e., the lack of knowledge about phylogenetic relationships) can help us to guide future biodiversity research and conservation efforts. Overcoming this shortfall is essential to develop robust strategies to preserve the Tree of Life while facing the ongoing biodiversity crisis. Here, we present the first global assessment of Darwinian shortfalls and their [...]
Wild boar population control needs more than recreational hunting
Published: 2026-01-09
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity
This perspective addresses the challenges of wild boar (Sus scrofa) population control in two different scenarios: reactive management to control disease epidemics and proactive management of wild boar populations at larger geographic scales. Intense but silent wild boar culling can significantly contribute to local outbreak control. Larger wild boar free buffer zones might work in front-like [...]
TABMON: design and deployment of a transnational passive acoustic monitoring network for European birds
Published: 2026-01-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1. Ecological surveys are often fragmented, costly, and limited in scale, leading to large and long-standing knowledge gaps which threaten our ability to properly safeguard biodiversity. 2. Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) has promised to deliver automated biodiversity monitoring, but networks are rarely deployed on scales that can offer truly novel insights due to scalability and [...]
Spatial Expansion and Ecological Correlates of Invasive Crayfish Procambarus clarkii and Pacifastacus leniusculus in Mediterranean Rivers of Catalonia (NE Iberian Peninsula)
Published: 2026-01-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Invasive freshwater crayfish are among the most impactful non-native taxa in European river systems, yet quantitative assessments of their spatial expansion and environmental drivers remain scarce in Mediterranean regions. We investigated the expansion dynamics and environmental drivers of two invasive North American crayfish, Procambarus clarkii and Pacifastacus leniusculus, in rivers of [...]
Marine biodiversity indicators and online data knowledge systems
Published: 2026-01-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Marine Biology
Coastal marine ecosystems and biodiversity are changing rapidly under climate forcing, resource use, pollution and habitat modification. Monitoring these changes, and tracking progress across policy targets, remain constrained by uneven data coverage, fragmented observing networks and inconsistent measurement practices. International policy frameworks, most prominently the Kunming-Montreal Global [...]
Actionable inference for biodiversity change hinges on representative data and model design
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Amidst the global biodiversity crisis, there is high demand for spatially explicit biodiversity indicators. Global models that quantify impacts of human pressures provide important insights for conservation, but their performance in spatial projections has not been systematically tested. W evaluate this using PREDICTS data, finding that, despite land-use impacts in line with previous research, [...]
Idiosyncrasies of Cistanthe ipniana Hershk. (C. sect. Rosulatae; Montiaceae)
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Biodiversity
Cistanthe ipniana Hershk. [C. sect. Rosulatae (Reiche) Hershk.; Montiaceae] was described briefly based on collections from Huasco Province, Atacama Region, Chile. The species is distinctive in having flower morphology essentially identical to that of C. litoralis and C. longiscapa, to which it is very closely related genetically, but a distinctive vegetative form identical to that of C. [...]
Local data matters: Improving biodiversity risk and impact assessment through a data quality focus
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Biodiversity
Widespread degradation of nature has increased pressure on corporations and financial institutions to assess and mitigate their biodiversity impact, however, collecting relevant local data can be costly. The increasing availability of biodiversity and Earth observation (EO) provide a route to cost effective impact assessment via extrapolation using existing data and statistical modeling. Through [...]
Moving Target(s): One Health at changing human-livestock-wildlife interfaces in tropical ecosystems
Published: 2025-12-18
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Food Science, Life Sciences, Systems Biology
One Health approaches currently conceptualized for Western landscapes require fundamental rethinking for tropics, where human-livestock-wildlife interfaces exist as variegated mosaics rather than discrete zones. This overview examines why tropical ecosystems involve (i) Human mobility patterns shifting continuously through rural-urban migration and globalization (ii) Livestock health [...]
Committed genetic erosion: parallels from climate science for proactive conservation
Published: 2025-12-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
While climate science recognises that past emissions lock in future impacts ("committed climate change"), the idea of lagged losses is less embedded in biodiversity policy. This is particularly true for genetic diversity loss (genetic erosion), the least visible dimension of the biodiversity crisis. To highlight this risk, we introduce the term "committed genetic erosion": future losses set in [...]
Deciphering the patterns and drivers of tardigrade diversity along altitudinal gradients
Published: 2025-12-15
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Altitudinal gradients offer a unique opportunity to understand the drivers of species richness, as mountain regions cover vast areas and contribute disproportionately to global terrestrial biodiversity. However, most studies have focused on larger organisms, often neglecting microscopic animals such as meiofauna also in mountain biodiversity research. In this study, we investigated patterns of [...]
A protocol for biodiversity-informed wildlife disease surveillance
Published: 2025-12-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences
Land use and climate change are increasing the risk of spillover of zoonotic disease into human populations. However, we lack actionable information about the prevalence of pathogens in wildlife populations for most of the globe, challenging our ability to implement strategies to prevent zoonoses. Even when this data exists, it has historically been sampled opportunistically and without guidance [...]
The weak driver conundrum: data archiving and biological phenomena impact macrogenetic findings
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Evolution, Genetics, Genomics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Macrogenetics seeks to identify the global drivers and patterns in intraspecific genetic diversity, yet many reported patterns are weak or inconsistent. To achieve multispecies global inference, many macrogenetic studies leverage open sequencing data that can suffer from archiving biases. It remains unclear if macrogenetic inconsistencies are innate genetic phenomena, or are the product of open [...]