Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Colorful birds face heightened extinction risk around the world
Published: 2025-06-10
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
Published: 2025-06-06
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
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
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
Published: 2025-05-28
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
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
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
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 [...]
Practical genetic diversity protection: an accessible framework for IUCN subpopulation and Evolutionarily Significant Unit identification
Published: 2025-05-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) sets global conservation standards, including the Red List of Threatened Species and the Green Status of Species. Recent analyses showed that genetic diversity has not been effectively considered by IUCN species assessments, despite being fundamental to species’ fitness and adaptive potential. Incorporation of genetic diversity into IUCN [...]
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 [...]