Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Data analysis choices influence the relative importance of multiple stressors on macroinvertebrates in agricultural streams
Published: 2026-05-09
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Robustness of multiple stressor rankings is essential for credible ecotoxicological assessments and policy guidance, yet how data aggregation and modelling choices shape conclusions about stressor importance remains poorly resolved. We addressed this gap using a fully reproducible approach on a widely cited dataset of 101 small agricultural streams across Germany, where earlier data analyses have [...]
Optimizing sampling and monitoring of species interactions within Biodiversity Observation Networks
Published: 2026-05-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Optimal monitoring strategies should be designed to efficiently monitor all essential facets of biodiversity. Yet, species interactions are often overlooked in monitoring designs compared to spatial coverage and species richness, partly due to the inherent difficulty of sampling and monitoring interactions compared to species distributions. Here, we used simulations to test the efficiency of [...]
Assessing the sensitivity and robustness of the Living Planet Index through simulated population dynamics: strengths, stability, and challenges
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Understanding population change through time is crucial for effective conservation of biodiversity. The Living Planet Index (LPI) is a key indicator for tracking global species abundance trends under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, offering a picture of population change over time. However, the sensitivity of the index to population abundance being recorded as absent in a [...]
The evolutionary link between food, condiments and medicine
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Anthropology, Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Food Science, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The deep relationship between humans and plants is of great interest to ethnobotanists, human ecologists, and evolutionary biologists. Humans have incorporated thousands of plant species into both traditional medicine and our diets, as foods and condiments. Many of these provide not only calories but also micronutrients and other bioactive compounds that contribute to health [1]. The boundaries [...]
Rethinking angiosperm diversification through the functional integration of mutualisms
Published: 2026-05-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Plant Sciences, Systems Biology
Flowering plants have generated and maintained exceptional diversity for over 100 million years despite repeated environmental change and mass extinction events. Explaining this evolutionary success requires understanding not only how new lineages arise, but also how they persist after divergence. Although multiple ecological traits and interactions are known to influence angiosperm [...]
Functional diversity of tundra vascular plants over space and time
Published: 2026-04-29
Subjects: Biodiversity
Aim: Rapid warming across the tundra biome is driving widespread changes in vascular plant community composition. While species turnover is well-documented, the ramifications for tundra functional diversity are unknown. Here, we quantify biome-scale spatial gradients and temporal trends in the functional diversity of tundra vegetation for the first time. Location: A biome-scale synthesis of in [...]
Representational limits in detecting ecological change
Published: 2026-04-29
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Biotechnology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Food Science, Forest Sciences, Genetics and Genomics, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Other Life Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Physiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Systems Biology
Detecting ecological change remains a persistent challenge, even in systems with extensive monitoring data and increasingly sophisticated analytical tools. Uncertainty is usually attributed to stochasticity, limited observations, or imperfect models. Here, I argue that an additional and largely overlooked constraint arises from representational limits: systematic ways in which graphs, indicators, [...]
Autonomous biodiversity credits on the horizon?
Published: 2026-04-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Biodiversity credits are being pushed as a means to fund nature conservation. Much of the debate around credits has concerned additionality, leakage, and permanence, and the extent to which biodiversity can be captured in an individual unit. As AI models continue to develop, however, technology could create a new kind of loss-of-control problem for biodiversity credits. In this Perspective, we [...]
First record of Poa cf. annua on Fildes Peninsula (King George Island), a major human-access node in Antarctica
Published: 2026-04-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems are highly species-poor and particularly vulnerable to biological invasions. Poa annua L. is the only non-native flowering plant known to have established a persistent, self-sustaining population in Antarctica, with confirmed occurrences on King George Island near the H. Arctowski Polish Antarctic Station and the Ecology Glacier forefield. Here we report a new [...]
Sample size shapes metabarcoding-driven biodiversity assessments across body sizes in soil
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Life Sciences
Understanding how sample size influences biodiversity detection across taxonomic groups differing in body size is critical for designing robust and cost-efficient metabarcoding studies of soil eukaryotes. Using a soil mass gradient (0.25-32 g) combined with a universal 18S rRNA metabarcoding approach, we quantified how sample mass shapes diversity estimates across eukaryotic taxa. Diversity [...]
drmr: A Bayesian approach to Dynamic Range Models in R
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Predicting how species distributions will respond to environmental change is a critical challenge. Dynamic Range Models (DRMs) offer a powerful mechanistic approach by explicitly modeling the influence of environmental drivers on demographic processes. However, the widespread adoption of DRMs has been hindered by their inherent complexity and a critical gap in the available software. While many [...]
Fifteen Years of Community-Based Monitoring of Mammals and Birds in Forest Stewardship Council Certified Forest Areas in Tanzania
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Community-based Research, Forest Management
Certified community-managed forests are rare in East Africa, and the use of community-based monitoring to track biodiversity change in such forests is rarer still. We analyse 15 years of community-collected data on the status and abundance of mammals and birds from 10 village land forest reserves in southern coastal Tanzania, managed under a Forest Stewardship Council certification scheme [...]
Molecular identification and diversity assessment of Tyrrhenian Romulea species (iridaceae)
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Plant Sciences
Taxonomic assignments based only on morphology are often insufficient for delimiting species, particularly in polyploid complexes with extensive morphological overlap. This limitation hinders biogeographic and conservation issues. The genus Romulea (Iridaceae), distributed across Africa and the Mediterranean Basin, exemplifies this challenge. Despite its remarkable diversity, Mediterranean [...]
Reporting on the extent of natural ecosystems under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Biodiversity
Unlike its predecessors, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework emphasises ecosystems in its targets, goals, and monitoring framework. Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity are now expected to report on ecosystem indicators for the first time. Here we surveyed how Parties reported on Headline Indicator A.2 (Extent of Natural Ecosystems) in their 7th National Reports to the [...]
Multi-scale collapse of coral cover under climate change
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Biology, Dynamic Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Marine Biology, Mathematics, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Survival Analysis, Systems Biology
Projecting ecosystem trajectories under future climates is critical for conservation planning, yet remains constrained by uncertainty arising from limited data, ecological complexity, and biological and environmental variability. Variability, when disentangled from uncertainty, offers critical insights into population and community dynamics. For example, enhanced vital rates (growth, survival, [...]