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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity

Going Global by Going Local: Impacts and Opportunities of Geographically Focused Data Integration

Malgorzata Lagisz, Martin Westgate, Dax Kellie, et al.

Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences

Biodiversity conservation is a global challenge that requires the integration of global and local data. Expanding global data infrastructures have opened unprecedented opportunities for biodiversity data storage, curation, and dissemination. Within one such infrastructure – the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) – these benefits are achieved by aggregating data from over 100 regional [...]

Multiple global-change drivers and cascading effects in Mediterranean ecosystems: Lessons from an iconic national park

Maria Paniw, Duarte S Viana, Cristina Coccia, et al.

Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Historically, Mediterranean systems, particularly the Mediterranean Basin, have been substantially impacted by multiple regional-scale disturbances resulting from complex interactive effects of global-change drivers. However, such effects are typically studied on isolated groups of organisms, often disregarding how ecological processes such as biotic interactions affect ecosystem responses to [...]

Elevating the importance of Risk of Bias assessment for ecology and evolution

Antica Culina, Dugald Foster, Matthew Grainger, et al.

Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are key evidence synthesis methods informing research and policy. An assessment of the Risk of Bias (RoB) in included studies is normally considered an essential component of these. However, RoB assessment is rare in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), and tools from other fields are seldom adopted. To identify reasons for this limited uptake, we surveyed [...]

Characterising the structural complexity across major habitats of Tenerife, Spain

Samantha Suter, Rüdiger Otto, José María Fernández-Palacios, et al.

Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences

Understanding biodiversity changes across ecosystems requires the consideration of various biodiversity dimensions, such as habitat structural complexity – the degree of heterogeneity in the distribution of plant material in three-dimensional space. Yet, its inclusion in long-term biodiversity monitoring on oceanic islands remains limited. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can be used to quantify [...]

Non-native grass invasion drives biodiversity loss after a single fire in a semi-arid shrubland

Adam Lee Mahood, Jennifer Balch, David Barnard, et al.

Published: 2025-06-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Desert Ecology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

In the United States Great Basin, invasive annual grasses have initiated a novel grass-fire cycle that has transformed vast areas of semi-arid shrublands into non-native annual grasslands that now burn frequently. After the initial transformation, the system is so fire prone that it is difficult to find areas that have not burned repeatedly. We evaluated how the ecosystem responds in the absence [...]

Colorful birds face heightened extinction risk around the world

Montague Neate-Clegg, Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela

Published: 2025-06-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Ornithology

Many of the functional traits that mediate extinction risk across the tree life relate indirectly to a species’ ability to persist in a changing world. Yet, there are certain traits such as coloration that directly affect human interactions with wildlife. Here, we use an existing dataset of color metrics for 4334 passerine bird species combined with global functional trait data to determine [...]

Generalized graphical mixed models connect ecological theory with widely used statistical models

James T Thorson

Published: 2025-06-07
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Environmental Sciences, Multivariate Analysis

Ecological dynamics are analyzed across multiple sites, times, and variables. Here, we introduce the family of generalized graphical mixed models (GGMMs) and show that it extends structural equation, generalized additive, and generalized linear mixed models. GGMMs represent ecological systems using a mathematical graph, where each analytic unit (node for each site-time-variable) has a direct [...]

Evolution of Nassauvia Comm. ex Juss. (Asteraceae; Nassauvieae): new insights from old data

Mark Alan Hershkovitz

Published: 2025-06-06
Subjects: Biodiversity

The present work collated and reanalyzed DNA sequences for species of Nassauvia Comm. ex Juss. (including erstwhile Triptilion Ruiz & Pav.) (Asteraceae, Nassauvieae) reported in several previously published phylogenetic analyses. These sequences included: (i) the nuclear ribosomal DNA internal transcribed spacer region (ITS) and (ii) 5’ external transcribed spacer (ETS), and (iii) the [...]

Barriers and opportunities to preventing residential bird-window collisions

Anastasia Lysyk, Aalia I Khan, Deborah Conners, et al.

Published: 2025-05-31
Subjects: Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Sociology

Collisions with windows are a leading source of avian mortality in North America. Window treatment options are commercially available; however, these solutions are rarely used. To investigate knowledge and perceptions of bird-window collisions, willingness to treat windows, and barriers and solutions to treating windows we conducted a survey of residents in Ottawa, Canada. Of 422 survey [...]

Herbarium specimens reveal regional patterns of tallgrass prairie invasion and changing species abundance across 130 years

Matthew Austin, Andrew Kaul, Adam Smith, et al.

Published: 2025-05-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences

The spread of non-native species is an acute threat to global biodiversity. However, a lack of long-term, spatially widespread occurrence data has prevented investigation of how multi-species invasions affect native assemblages. We harnessed more than 65,000 digitized herbarium specimens across 522 species to study how relative abundances of native and non-native species have changed since the [...]

Filling Monitoring Gaps for Data-deficient Species Using Annual Occupancy Predictions from Co-occurrence Models

Hyun Yong Chung, Dae Kyung Lee, John Losey

Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences

Fragmented surveys and limited monitoring exclude most invertebrate species from conservation policy. We present a framework that generates annual occupancy predictions using species distribution models (SDMs) to reconstruct missing trends—not to extrapolate trends, but to fill them in (the fill-in approach). Instead of filtering poor-data regions and years or relying on static environmental [...]

Reply to: Maximising time-series inclusion reduces geographic and taxonomic biases in the Living Planet Index

David Storch, Jan Smyčka, Anna Tószögyová

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 [...]

Is there a relationship between distance to natural habitat and pollination services in tropical smallholder farms? A systematic review and meta-analysis

Ennia Bosshard, Mark E Harrison, Frank J. F. van Veen, et al.

Published: 2025-05-13
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology

Proximity to natural habitat is known to enhance pollination services in agricultural landscapes, particularly in large-scale industrialised farms. However, it remains unclear whether these patterns hold in tropical smallholder farms – ecologically complex landscapes that sustain millions of the world’s most food-insecure communities and depend heavily on biodiversity-derived ecosystem services. [...]

The distribution of genetic diversity in ecological communities: A unifying measure for monitoring biodiversity change

Isaac Overcast, Irene Calderon-Sanou, Simon Creer, et al.

Published: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity

Monitoring the “health” of an ecological community is a critical component of conservation planning. We propose that aggregating intraspecific genetic variation across all species of an ecological community (Community Genetic Distribution; CGD) provides a new way to measure biodiversity that is unifying across taxa, economically scalable, and geographically transferable. Such community-scale data [...]

Applying essential ecosystem service variables to analyse thirty years of wild salmon provisioning trends in Canada

Flavio Affinito, Marie-Josee Fortin, Andrew Gonzalez

Published: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences

Wild salmon commercial fisheries in British Columbia (BC), Canada, have seen decreasing return and catch numbers across multiple salmon populations. Successful management of this ecosystem service (ES) has been elusive, but there is recognition that a wider social-ecological perspective is needed to support recovery. While ES monitoring is essential for evidence-based management, the [...]

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