Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Filling Monitoring Gaps for Data-deficient Species Using Annual Occupancy Predictions from Co-occurrence Models
Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Fragmented surveys and limited monitoring have excluded most invertebrates from conservation policy. We present a fill-in framework that uses species distribution models (SDMs) to reconstruct missing annual trends—not to extrapolate trends, but to fill them in. Instead of filtering data-sparse regions or years or relying on static environmental variables, we used co-occurrence patterns (COP) as [...]
Reply to: Maximising time-series inclusion reduces geographic and taxonomic biases in the Living Planet Index
Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Biodiversity
In their recent communication, "Maximising time-series inclusion reduces geographic and taxonomic biases in the Living Planet Index" (https://doi.org/10.32942/X2M33C), McRae et al. have raised objections to our study, "Mathematical biases in the calculation of the Living Planet Index lead to overestimation of vertebrate population decline" (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49070-x). In this [...]
Proximity to natural habitat is not consistently associated with pollination services in tropical smallholder farms: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Published: 2025-05-13
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Proximity to natural habitat is known to enhance pollination services in large-scale agriculture, but it remains unclear whether this holds in tropical smallholder farms. These systems are embedded in ecologically complex landscapes, central to global food security, and depend heavily on biodiversity-derived ecosystem services. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 35 studies [...]
The Community Genetic Distribution (CGD): A unifying measure for monitoring biodiversity change
Published: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity
Monitoring the condition of ecological communities is essential to understanding, managing and conserving biodiversity. Much needed is a means to measure holistic properties that emerge from ecological communities, in other words attributes that characterize communities as a whole rather than individual species or sets of species. Here, we propose the Community Genetic Distribution (CGD) as a [...]
Applying essential ecosystem service variables to analyse thirty years of wild salmon provisioning trends in Canada
Published: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Systematic monitoring of ecosystem services (ES) is crucial for achieving sustainability goals but hampered by siloed and disjointed monitoring efforts that rarely consider the full range of social, economic, and ecological variables shaping ES dynamics. The essential ecosystem service variables (EESV) framework is intended to tackle these challenges but its application remains limited. Using [...]
A practical framework for identifying genetic subpopulations and ESUs: insights for IUCN assessments and broader management
Published: 2025-05-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Species conservation assessments, such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List and Green Status of Species, guide global conservation priorities by evaluating species’ extinction risk and recovery status. Although such frameworks provide scope to include genetic information, this aspect of biodiversity, which is critical for species’ fitness and adaptive [...]
Genetic load in Evolutionarily Significant Units (ESUs): conservation and management implications
Published: 2025-05-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
The Conservation Genetics Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) proposes introducing Evolutionarily Significant Units (ESUs) as an additional new assessment unit in the IUCN Red List and Green Status. This proposal is made because ESUs possess unique evolutionary trajectories present within species and harbour genetic diversity that requires safeguarding. [...]
Using large language models to address the bottleneck of georeferencing natural history collections
Published: 2025-05-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Natural history collections are fundamental for biodiversity research. The broad use of them relies on the digitization effort, especially georeferencing that translates textual locality descriptions into geographic coordinates. However, traditional georeferencing approaches are labor-intensive and costly, thus georeferencing is a major bottleneck in the digitization process that prevents the [...]
“A history of the world imperfectly kept”: Will we ever know how biodiversity has changed over deep time?
Published: 2025-05-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Evolution, Paleobiology
The fossil record is our only direct source of evidence for how life on Earth has waxed and waned over its long history. However, the fossil record is also incomplete and biased in many ways, after passing through biological, geological, and socio-economic filters. This means that we only possess snapshots of information, relating to specific places and times in Earth history, from which to try [...]
Accounting for biodiversity impacts of consumption and production: current gaps and frontiers.
Published: 2025-05-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
The way humans produce and consume material goods continues to be a primary driving force on biodiversity decline. Despite significant advances in quantifying biodiversity footprints, important differences exist across types of approaches and indicators. These include, what aspects of biodiversity are measured and how they are reported. In this scoping review, we provide an overview of [...]
Nature requires investment: applying Priority Threat Management to support biodiversity and climate targets
Published: 2025-05-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy
1. Stemming biodiversity loss requires greater investment in conservation and more efficient use of available resources. Prioritizing conservation actions that yield the most biodiversity benefit for the least cost can help maximize return on investment. Actions that have co-benefits for other objectives, such as climate change mitigation, can also help mobilize additional funds for conservation. [...]
Seasonal upwelling and depth-driven gradients foster functional overdispersion in Southwestern Atlantic annelid assemblages
Published: 2025-04-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Marine communities on continental shelves form through a combination of environmental filtering, biotic interaction, and dispersal-based processes. These shelves present depth-related environmental gradients from nearshore and seasonal upwelling systems, which periodically supply cold, dispersalenhancing, nutrient-rich waters, providing an ideal setting to explore spatiotemporal [...]
Seeking to quantify contributions that fisheries operations can make to a global Nature Positive goal
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Marine Biology
Amidst global efforts to address biodiversity loss, the concept of ‘Nature Positive’ has gained traction as a societal goal aligned with the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). While the goal is increasingly being embraced by businesses and governments, there has been little investigation into how fisheries, a key sector in the global economy and a major driver of marine biodiversity loss, could [...]
Decline of the globally rare old-growth specklebelly lichen, Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis, and its implications for temperate rainforest conservation
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology
Epiphytic lichens are key components of temperate rainforests, where they contribute to forest hydrology, nutrient cycles, food webs, and overall biomass and biodiversity. Despite their ecological importance and sensitivity to environmental change few protections exist for lichen conservation and management. Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis, or old-growth specklebelly lichen, is considered an [...]
Key Biodiversity Areas and Important Plant Areas can help build ecologically representative Protected and Conserved Area networks to meet 30-by-30
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Expanding the global network of Protected and Conserved Areas (PCAs) to cover 30% of the planet by 2030 (30-by-30) is mandated in the Global Biodiversity Framework. However, if PCA expansion is undertaken hastily, it risks inadvertently overlooking important species or ecosystems and entrenching existing spatial and taxonomic biases. We investigate, across 28 countries, whether sites identified [...]