Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Indirect effects dominate ecosystem service losses in response to agricultural intensification
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Feeding a growing human population while preventing biodiversity loss is a major challenge. Land conversion impacts multiple ecosystem services (ESs), including food production and biodiversity-dependent services; yet, the role of indirect effects on ESs within this context, such as parasitoids boosting crop yield by controlling herbivores, remains poorly understood. Using species-network data [...]
Agroecological farming promotes yield and biodiversity but may require subsidy to be profitable
Published: 2025-03-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Intensive arable agriculture uses agrochemicals to replace ecosystem services (e.g. pest control and soil health) while simultaneously degrading others (e.g. pollination). Agroecological farming aims to reduce this reliance. Whether these practices maintain yields at a scale relevant to farm business viability is unclear. 2. In a 4-year replicated study across 17 English farms we assessed [...]
Modeling future tree species distributions under climate change to guide restoration planning: Application to the Brazilian Amazon
Published: 2025-02-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Addressing climate change and biodiversity loss requires innovative approaches to ecosystem restoration. This study aims to (1) develop a statistical tool to predict species distribution shifts under future climate scenarios and (2) apply it to 30 key tree species in the Brazilian Amazon, a biodiversity hotspot increasingly threatened by deforestation and climate change. Using MaxEnt, we modeled [...]
Combining eDNA and Museomics to Enhance Biodiversity Monitoring
Published: 2025-02-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Genetics and Genomics
Biodiversity changes due to human activities highlight the need for efficient biodiversity monitoring approaches. Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding offers a non-invasive method to assess species distributions, but its accuracy depends on comprehensive DNA reference databases. Natural history museum collections often contain rare or difficult to obtain samples that could be used as a resource [...]
Landscape anthropization drives composition and diversity of butterfly communities at a regional scale
Published: 2025-02-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim While landscape anthropization is a key driver of biodiversity change, its effects on communities are underexplored, especially at regional scales. In the Anthropocene, climate and habitat diversity alone are insufficient to explain community structure. However, until recently, ecologists lacked accessible, synthesized data describing anthropization gradients, which limited studies to [...]
Genetic diversity is key to a nature-positive future
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
1. Nature-positive describes the concept of halting and then reversing the loss of biodiversity in a manner that is equitable to all, particularly indigenous peoples and local communities. 2. Genetic diversity is the foundational component of biodiversity, underpinning species and ecosystem diversity. Genetic diversity is vital to resilience and ecosystem services. While genetic diversity was [...]
Climate change intensifies plant-pollinator mismatch and increases secondary extinction risk for plants in northern latitudes
Published: 2025-02-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Climate change is altering the timing of species’ life-cycle events (i.e., phenology), but the rates of phenological shifts vary across taxa. These mismatches in phenological response may disrupt interactions between interdependent species, such as plants and their pollinators, which may lead to reduced plant reproduction via pollen limitation and contribute to secondary extinction risks for [...]
A Julia toolkit for species distribution data
Published: 2025-02-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
(1) Species distribution modeling requires to handle varied types of data, and benefits from an integrated approach to programming. (2) We introduce SpeciesDistributionToolkit, a Julia package aiming to facilitate the production of species distribution models. It covers various steps of the data collection and analysis process, extending to the development of interfaces for integration of [...]
An influential biodiversity market may not direct investment towards habitats of national importance
Published: 2025-02-13
Subjects: Biodiversity
Biodiversity markets are proliferating globally, aiming to increase private investment to address conservation financing gaps. Markets commodify biodiversity to facilitate trade of biodiversity ‘units’ even across heterogeneous ecologies. However, the metric used to commodify biodiversity can strongly influence which habitats become valuable in biodiversity markets, and there has been little [...]
Algorithm selection for optimal ecological monitoring design
Published: 2025-02-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Comprehensive monitoring of biodiversity to direct conservation action is foundational to addressing the ongoing biodiversity crisis. As integrative monitoring programs increasingly come online in response to multilateral biodiversity agreements, establishing best practices for optimal design is critical. Selecting the appropriate algorithm for identifying sample sites is both necessary for [...]
Seeing herbaria in a new light: leaf reflectance spectroscopy unlocks predictive trait and classification modeling in plant biodiversity collections
Published: 2025-02-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Reflectance spectroscopy is a non-destructive, rapid, and robust method for estimating functional traits and distinguishing species. Spectral reflectance libraries generated from herbarium specimens are an untapped and promising resource for generating broad phenomic datasets across space, time, and species. We conducted a proof-of-concept study using functional trait data and spectra from [...]
Overcoming “doom and gloom”: Envisioning desirable futures for Arctic biodiversity
Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
We co-created visions of desirable futures for Arctic biodiversity during a workshop which included representatives from academia, Indigenous Peoples, business and policy-making. Appreciating our diverse perspectives, we identified key actions that would enable the positive outcomes shared in our visions: boosting education, rethinking Arctic biodiversity governance, elevating the voices of [...]
Maximising time-series inclusion reduces geographic and taxonomic biases in the Living Planet Index
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Biodiversity
Measuring how and why biodiversity is changing is critical to protecting it. Among the tools developed to measure biodiversity, one indicator has come under recent scrutiny. The Living Planet Index (LPI) is an indicator based on vertebrate population trends used as evidence for policy and a resource for scientific research; it has a high profile and global reach in the media by conveying a simple [...]
Identifying the collector practices that shape spatial, temporal, and taxonomic bias in herbaria
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Natural history collections (NHCs) are essential for studying biodiversity. While spatial, temporal, and taxonomic biases in NHCs affect analyses, the influence of collector practices on biases remains largely unexplored. We utilized one million digitized specimens collected in the northeastern United States from 237 herbaria and analyzed contributions from ~10,000 collectors. We investigated (a) [...]
The business case for investing in biodiversity data
Published: 2025-02-04
Subjects: Biodiversity
1. The private sector is increasingly aware of its dependence on biodiversity and the financial risks and opportunities involved. This has generated a lot of demand for investing in nature-positive solutions. There is an obvious and non-negotiable basis for such initiatives: biodiversity data. Without this data and the tools built from it, no actor can assess the effects on the ecosystems they [...]