Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Embryos are largely understudied in conservation physiology
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology
Understanding how animals respond to environmental stressors across their life cycle is essential for predicting species’ vulnerability to climate change. Here, we systematically reviewed the literature to quantify the variation in research effort on different life stages in the field of conservation physiology. Specifically, we reviewed experimental studies measuring physiological and [...]
Connectivity, Fire, and Land Use: Understanding Platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) Persistence in Fragmented Watersheds
Published: 2025-08-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Aim: Effective biodiversity conservation requires improved understanding of species distributions, and of the influence of threatening processes on those distributions. This is particularly important for freshwater species, which are difficult to survey even as they are exposed to disproportionately high levels of threat. Here we address this issue for the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), an [...]
Comparing screening outcomes of national and global biodiversity datasets for private sector nature-related disclosures
Published: 2025-08-12
Subjects: Biodiversity
In response to demand for better biodiversity stewardship from the private sector, frameworks such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) have been developed to help companies assess, manage and disclose their nature-related impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities. A key initial screening step is to identify operations in ecologically sensitive areas, often done [...]
Opportunities for Cities to Cultivate Biodiversity
Published: 2025-08-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Policy, Environmental Studies, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Plant Sciences, Public Policy, Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration, Systems Biology, Urban Studies and Planning
Cities pose a major threat to global biodiversity in every sense of the word. Municipal leaders have opportunities to promote biodiversity efforts in their cities. Several studies have shown that managing resources with biodiversity in mind within cities is effective and benefits both human and non-human residents and visitors. Two major opportunities for biodiversity investment in urban areas [...]
Predictive Evolutionary Genomics: Principles, Validation, and Practice
Published: 2025-08-10
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Population Biology
Contemporary evolution occurs on observable timescales, enabling prospective evolutionary forecasting with quantitative frameworks rather than only retrospective inference. We propose a unified probabilistic framework that integrates three approaches linked to detectability windows through time. Trait-based models use multivariate quantitative-genetic equations to project correlated phenotypic [...]
Progress toward sustainable management of marine crustacean fisheries
Published: 2025-08-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Population Biology
Marine crustacean capture fisheries have been contributing increasingly more to global aquatic food production in recent decades, helping secure socioeconomic benefits. In the past decade the landings of marine crustaceans rose by more than 67% while expanding spatially and taxonomically, doubling their contribution to global fisheries landings. Although efforts to improve the data collection [...]
Trapper Citizen Science: an open-source camera trap platform for citizen science in wildlife research and management
Published: 2025-08-10
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Computational Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Effective wildlife monitoring is essential for biodiversity conservation and sustainable management, particularly in the face of rapid environmental changes and human-wildlife interactions. Advances in camera trap technology and citizen science, here used to denote non-professional involvement in scientific research, irrespective of citizenship status, have revolutionized ecological data [...]
Urbanization Effects on Plant Parasitism: A Multi-Regional Comparison of Endemic Occurrence and Outbreak Intensity
Published: 2025-08-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Parasitology, Plant Pathology, Urban Studies and Planning
Microbial and insect parasitism plays a crucial role in shaping plant communities. The urban stress hypothesis posits that urbanization increases parasitism owing to the physiological environment, whereas the habitat fragmentation hypothesis suggests that habitat fragmentation in urban areas suppresses disease transmission. In the epidemiological triangle (comprising pathogen occurrence, [...]
Tracking the hidden niches: Movement-based insights into northern lapwing intraspecific variation and conservation
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Zoology
Context. Global monitoring data reveal farmland bird population declines, primarily driven by agricultural intensification, chemical inputs, and climate shifts. The northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), a ground-nesting wader adapted to lowland agricultural matrices, exemplifies this decline across Europe. Objectives. This study quantified intraspecific variation in habitat selection to evaluate [...]
Exploring the Integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Artificial Intelligence to Mitigate Human-Wildlife Conflict in Kerala, India
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Increasing human-wildlife conflict (HWC) in forest-fringe landscapes necessitates innovative and culturally acceptable mitigation strategies. This note proposes integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mitigate HWC in Kerala. The proposition aims to translate African rural traditional knowledge of using alarm calls of Guinea fowls (Numida meleagris) [...]
Illegal cattle trade brings New World Screwworm to wildlife and continues to destroy 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
The New World Screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax; “screwworm”) is a parasitic fly historically endemic to the Americas. Females lay eggs in open wounds of warm-blooded animals, including humans. The emerging larvae feed on the host’s living tissue, often resulting in severe damage and potentially death. After five decades of coordinated efforts, the screwworm was successfully eradicated from [...]
Trade-offs between nature and people reveal challenges in translating global conservation targets into national realities
Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Nutrition
Achieving global biodiversity targets depends on the ability of individual countries to translate targets into reality on the ground. In 2022, 196 parties committed to conserving 30% of the planet by 2030, yet questions remain over whether existing protected areas are effective at conserving biodiversity, and furthermore whether conservation successes impact the wellbeing of local communities. We [...]
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: 2025-07-24
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 [...]