Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
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: 2025-04-24
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 [...]
Leveraging large language models for ecological interpretation using an eBird chatbot case study
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. The anthropocene presents significant challenges for global biodiversity, public health, and long-term ecosystem stability. The wealth of publicly available near-real-time ecology and climate data can be used to monitor these challenges and allow practitioners to develop mitigation strategies. 2. There is untapped potential to apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to quantitative ecological and [...]
Balancing Accessibility and Security: Safeguarding Citizen-Sourced Biodiversity Data in the Age of AI and Open-Sourced Software
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and open-source software are revolutionizing biodiversity monitoring by democratizing access to citizen-science datasets. While these advancements facilitate conservation efforts and scientific research, they pose significant risks for data misuse. Researchers who reduce barriers to accessing such biodiversity datasets are responsible for safeguarding sensitive data.
BOLDistilled: Comprehensive but compact DNA barcode reference libraries
Published: 2025-04-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Advances in DNA sequencing technology have stimulated the rapid uptake of protocols—such as eDNA analysis and metabarcoding—that infer the species composition of environmental samples from DNA sequences. DNA barcode reference libraries play a critical role in the interpretation of sequences gathered through such protocols, but many lack adequate taxonomic curation, include redundant records, do [...]
Delineating freshwater fish biogeographic regions in the Philippine archipelago
Published: 2025-04-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The Philippines, a biodiversity hotspot with a complex geological history, presents an ideal setting to study freshwater fish biogeography in archipelagos. Despite its ecological significance, analyses of freshwater fish distribution patterns across the archipelago remain lacking. This study addresses this knowledge gap by delineating native freshwater fish biogeographic regions in the [...]
Spatially varying population indices
Published: 2025-04-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Population Biology
Large scale monitoring is fundamental for reliably tracking the fate of animal populations under changing environments and land-use practices. A common application of large scale population monitoring data is to produce indices of temporal change in species abundances, which are used in environmental policy assessments of species and biodiversity statuses. For index estimation, spatio-temporal [...]
Deep-learning technology provides insights into the morphological evolution of birds
Published: 2025-04-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Computational Engineering, Evolution, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
The evolution of biological morphology is critical for understanding the diversity of the natural world, yet traditional analyses often involve subjective biases in the selection and coding of morphological traits. This study employs deep learning techniques, utilizing a pretrained ResNet34 model capable of recognizing over 10,000 bird species, to explore avian morphological evolution. We [...]
Variability, drivers, and utility of genetic diversity-area relationships in terrestrial vertebrates
Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Maintaining genetic diversity within and among populations is critical for conservation and a prominent goal of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. However, direct estimates of genetic diversity are unavailable for most species, and time and resources are insufficient to fill these substantial data gaps and meet conservation target timelines. Robust, proxy-based predictions of [...]
Revision of a revised phylogenetic analysis of Leucheria Lag. sensu lato (Asteraceae; Nassauvieae) with remarks on theoretical aspects of phylogenetics and phylogenomics
Published: 2025-03-28
Subjects: Biodiversity
Presented here is a revised analysis of a previous phylogenetic analysis of the Leucheria Lag. s. l. crown group (Asteraceae; Nassauvieae), which was, in turn, a reanalysis of an earlier analysis of Leucheria s. stricto. Leucheria s. l. includes Polyachyrus Lag, and the crown group includes Oxyphyllum Phil. The present analysis adds several more recently published sequences of the nuclear [...]
Habitat filtering, not dispersal limitation, drives ant and termite community assembly along a tropical forest regeneration gradient
Published: 2025-03-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Regenerating forests comprise a significant proportion of forest ecosystems in the tropics. However, species assembly mechanisms after anthropogenic disturbances are still poorly understood. It has been shown that locally established ant communities clearly assemble along gradients of forest regeneration. However, it is unclear if this is determined by dispersal limitation or habitat filtering [...]
Alike but still different: coexistence of four raptor species explained by breeding niche overlap
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Late Pleistocene faunal community patterns disrupted by Holocene human impacts
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Paleobiology
We analysed fossil mammal assemblages from over 350 Late Pleistocene and Holocene sites worldwide to test whether human activities, such as agriculture, domestication and intensified land use, restructured global patterns of mammal co-occurrence. Using presence-absence data, we contrasted a novel iterative ‘chase clustering’ method, which is compositionally driven, against a traditional spatially [...]
Predicting interaction frequency in plant-pollinator networks
Published: 2025-03-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Flowers and their pollinators represent a bipartite interaction system, whose links are hypothesised to be related to species traits. To explore whether we can predict the weight of this link, i.e. the frequency of interactions, in an validation network, we analysed 14 studies of pollinator-flower visitation network from around the world. We used information on species abundances, their traits [...]
Conservation macrogenetics reveals the potential hidden consequences of the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires on Australian biodiversity
Published: 2025-03-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
The use of genetic analyses has become ubiquitous in conservation planning and management. Typically, such analyses are employed at the species-level, though as genetic data accrue, it is now possible to consider the genetic composition of multiple species across landscapes. Such macrogenetic perspectives can reveal the potential genetic ramifications of extreme disturbance events, such as [...]