Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
How cities lock in biodiversity persistence, recovery, and decline
Published: 2026-06-15
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Cities are expanding biodiversity plans, restoration projects, green infrastructure, corridors, and nature-based solutions. This Perspective defines biodiversity lock-ins as self-reinforcing urban pathways that make it difficult to reverse biodiversity persistence, recovery, or decline. It contributes a durability lens that links six urban mechanisms with biodiversity-specific features, including [...]
Connected but Misaligned: Rethinking Urban Nature for Biodiversity, Equity, and Resilience
Published: 2026-06-15
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Urban nature is often planned through partial forms of connectivity: habitat corridors for biodiversity, green infrastructure networks for ecosystem services, accessibility networks for public use, and governance networks for implementation. Yet connected urban nature can still fail. Connectivity misalignment occurs when connections in one domain coexist with disconnection, inequity, risk, weak [...]
From social experience to social behaviour: hormonal and behavioural phenotypes during adolescence in male guinea pigs
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Adolescence is the transition from juvenility to adulthood and is characterized by prominent endocrine, neural and behavioural alterations. Thus, adolescence represents a sensitive phase during which social experiences can shape endocrine and behavioural phenotypes. Although the influence of the social environment during adolescence has been widely investigated, most studies assessed such effects [...]
Motivations and organizational models for private sector biodiversity engagement
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Private sector engagement is increasingly recognized as critical for addressing global biodiversity loss, yet the recent IPBES global assessment of business and biodiversity confirms that current economic conditions remain largely incompatible with the transformative change required. We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with business leaders and sustainability practitioners across multiple [...]
Still Money for Nothing? Two Decades of Empirical Evaluation of Conservation Investments
Published: 2026-05-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Twenty years ago, the landmark paper “Money for Nothing?” argued that biodiversity conservation relied too little on empirical evidence. It called for more evaluations of conservation effectiveness based on explicit counterfactuals, comparing observed outcomes with those that would likely have occurred in the absence of intervention. To assess progress towards this goal, we systematically [...]
Hidden role plasticity of the reproductive caste in a morphologically differentiated termite society
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Reproductive division of labor is the defining characteristic of eusocial insects, separating germline-like reproductives from soma-like workers. While most studies have focused on worker sterility, it is generally assumed that developing reproductives invest only in maturation, not in colony labor. Here we show that nymphs (pre-alates) in a highly structured termite society can contribute to [...]
Fishers’ local knowledge strengthens seagrass restoration planning
Published: 2026-05-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Seagrass restoration is increasingly guided by habitat suitability models, yet restoration outcomes depend on more than biophysical suitability alone. In coastal social-ecological systems, fishers and anglers hold fine-scale, time-integrated knowledge of habitat condition, human use, and local constraints that are rarely incorporated at the outset of restoration planning. Here, we tested whether [...]
Centering human cognition in epidemiological models
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Epidemiological models (EMs) have traditionally treated human behavior as static or as a simple function of disease prevalence, limiting their ability to capture disease trajectories such as those observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that infectious disease is fundamentally a coupled human-pathogen system in which cognition and behavior operate on different timescales and must be [...]
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 [...]
Learning, motivation, and social interaction in modern dolphin training
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Dolphin training is widely practiced in zoological facilities for performance, husbandry, research, and daily management, yet many of its practical principles remain insufficiently formalized in the scientific literature. This Perspective aims to provide a citable academic framework for modern dolphin training by synthesizing trainer-based practical knowledge within established concepts from [...]
Opportunities, Enablers and Requirements in Advancing Earth Observation for Scaling Nature Finance
Published: 2026-04-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Leveraging Earth Observation for Nature Finance (LEON) project, supported by the European Space Agency (ESA), seeks to transform the use of Earth Observation (EO) data in enabling, mobilising and scaling nature-positive finance globally. This report builds upon six months of structured research, landscape analysis and multi-stakeholder engagement to map the opportunities and requirements for [...]
Earth Observation to Scale Nature Finance: Survey 2025
Published: 2026-04-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This report presents the results of the LEON User Requirements Survey conducted in summer 2025 to understand how Earth Observation (EO) data can support the mobilisation and scaling of nature finance. The survey targeted financial institutions, data providers, and other stakeholders engaged in nature-related investment, risk management, and policy. A total of 27 organisations responded to the [...]
Nature-based Solutions for Climate and Disaster Risk Mitigation in SIPLAS: A Framework for Policy Integration and Innovative Financing
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Small island protected areas face compounding pressures from rapid urbanization, constrained land use, biodiversity loss, and intensifying climate and disaster risk, yet scholarship on how to finance and mainstream Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in governance-complex, nationally protected island systems remains limited. This study addresses that gap by examining the integration of NbS into climate [...]
Why are embodied social signals concentrated towards the rostral region? — The rostrum concentration hypothesis
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biological Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Although frequently embodied, the relationship of animal social communication with body layout has rarely been investigated from a unified cognitive perspective. Across animal taxa, socially relevant signals, ranging from facial expressions and gaze to colouration and morphology, are strikingly concentrated towards the anterior region of the body. Here, we propose the Rostrum Concentration [...]
Quantifying information content using population genetics concepts and equations to develop new insights into information distribution in human communities
Published: 2026-04-03
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Information evolves within human societies in ways that parallel the evolution of genes in biological populations. Applying classical population genetics equations, we developed a framework in which the rates of learning and forgetting define the net balance of informational change, and directional exchange among groups can be represented as information flow. We apply this framework to a 43-year [...]