Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Delineating freshwater fish biogeographic regions in the Philippine archipelago
Published: 2025-04-14
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: 2025-04-09
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: 2025-03-20
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 [...]
The human fingerprint of medicinal plant species diversity
Published: 2025-03-15
Subjects: Anthropology, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biotechnology, Environmental Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures
Medicinal plants have long been crucial to human civilizations, supporting both traditional and modern healthcare systems. However, the processes influencing the global diversity and distribution of medicinal plants remain underexplored. Their diversity, like that of other species groups, is shaped by abiotic and biotic influences, which include, in unique ways, human ecological (including [...]
The Interaction Affinity Between Flowers and Their Pollinators
Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
It is a common knowledge that the probability of the fertilisation of a flower by its pollinator is a function of species abundances. However, this relation was rarely formalised for analysing pollination networks. In this opinion paper, a simple model borrowed from physical chemistry is introduced to formalise this functional dependence. This led to a well-known biochemical concept of affinity, [...]
Historical legacies of spatial and temporal climate exposure on thermal physiology shape butterfly vulnerability to recent climate change
Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Few observations are more indelible in ecology than widespread variation in the spatial and temporal occurrence of species. Although the mechanistic underpinnings of such variation are likely multifarious, temperature is argued to be a key driver. Understanding how temperature shapes species ranges and seasonal activity not only provides insights into historical biogeographic patterns, but also [...]
The emerging need to manage scavenged wildlife resources
Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Biodiversity
Scavenged wildlife resources are a unique type of common pool wildlife resource that are collected without killing or capturing the animal, and their collection is understudied and potentially underregulated relative to their conservation significance. The separability of these resources from the living population of animals that produce them can complicate efforts to link collection to future [...]
Monitoring ecological corridors for nature and people
Published: 2025-03-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Ecological corridors designed to maintain ecological connectivity between protected and conserved areas is a conservation strategy that is increasingly embraced around the world. Monitoring corridor effectiveness is essential to gauge progress toward connectivity conservation objectives; it also fosters learning among diverse rightsholders and interested parties. In particular, monitoring how [...]