Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Reversing biodiversity loss requires a World Biodiversity Organisation that can bridge finance and nature
Published: 2026-05-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Business
Decades of research and politics have led to a coherent set of biodiversity metrics and strong evidence that biodiversity supports human well-being. So why do we not have a financial system that encourages conservation and restoration of nature? We argue that a central reason is that the financing used has not been aligned with the spatial and temporal structure of biodiversity. Ecosystems are [...]
A Protocol for Standardizing Measurements and Enabling Global Harmonization of Herbarium Leaf Reflectance Spectra
Published: 2026-05-20
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Reflectance spectroscopy offers a powerful approach to integrate high- throughput phenotypic data from herbarium specimens into the digital landscapes of ecology, evolution, and systematics. Spectral digitization complements specimen metadata capture and photographic imaging by generating high-dimensional optical data from herbarium tissues that encode information about plant chemistry and [...]
Designing for nature doesn't cost the Earth
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Urban Studies and Planning
1. A key barrier to the development of nature positive cities is the unknown cost of implementing novel urban design elements. Strict budgets and government approval processes make it challenging for developers to trial new approaches, meaning most developments rarely deviate from ‘business-as-usual’ (BAU). Further research is urgently needed to overcome this barrier to innovation and help [...]
The Global Biodiversity Framework supports global assessment of One Health actions
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences, Public Health
The One Health approach promotes collaboration across disciplines to enhance the health of humans, animals, plants, and the environment. Recently developed by the Quadripartite organizations, the One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022-2026) supports countries in adopting the One Health approach through six action tracks. The tracks address multiple aspects of biodiversity, containing guiding [...]
Making use of oak genomes
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Genomics, Life Sciences
This review summarizes the contributions of genomics to our understanding of oak evolution and management, both past and ongoing. Far from being exhaustive given the large number of publications following the publication of the genomes, this review emphasizes work conducted in the decade following publication of the first two complete oak genome assemblies, and major findings and achievements [...]
Nature finance: we need (some) offsets
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies
Nature offsets – mechanisms that allow for negative environmental impacts (e.g. biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions) to be fully compensated for and neutralized – are extremely widespread, but have become increasingly controversial, to the extent they are now starting to be precluded from new environmental policy developments. In turn, leaders are becoming more reticent about their [...]
Harnessing hidden synergies in conservation planning: do “umbrella action plans” reduce redundancy and improve efficiency?
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity
Conservation Action Plans (APs) are widely used to guide biodiversity interventions, but they are often developed in isolation, leading to redundancy and poorly coordinated implementation. We assess whether identifying thematic overlap among APs can reveal practical opportunities for coordination, and introduce the concept of Umbrella Action Plans (UAPs) as a framework to streamline conservation [...]
A Game-Theoretic and Dynamical-Systems Framework for Anti-Poaching Resource Allocation: A Case Study of Etosha National Park
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology
Wildlife poaching threatens biodiversity across sub-Saharan Africa, and is especially acute for critically endangered species such as the black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis). Etosha National Park, Namibia (22,935 km²), is patrolled by approximately 295 anti-poaching rangers—fewer than 0.02 per km²—posing two interlinked operational questions: where should a limited workforce be placed to maximise [...]
OdoCocktail-Japan: Primer sets to enrich environmental DNA of Japanese Odonata species
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Monitoring is essential to conserve and recover biodiversity. Environmental DNA (eDNA)-based metabarcoding analysis has been recognized as a cost-effective and efficient method to monitor species, but it still has limitations, such as insufficient reference databases and lack of primer sets suitable to detect target species. As biological indicators of freshwater habitats, Odonata species have [...]
Data analysis choices influence the relative importance of multiple stressors on macroinvertebrates in agricultural streams
Published: 2026-05-08
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: 2026-05-08
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: 2026-05-02
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: 2026-04-28
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 [...]