Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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: 2026-04-04
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 [...]
Standardizing turn-taking metrics: A methodological toolkit for data annotation across species and taxa
Published: 2026-03-27
Subjects: Animal Studies, Communication, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Conversational turn-taking, the cooperative reciprocal exchange of short and flexible turns, is fundamental for communication and social coordination. Initially thought to be uniquely human, recent research showed some evidence of cooperative turn-taking also in other animal species. However, systematic evaluations and comparisons of turn-taking skills within and across species pose considerable [...]
Bees as Ambassadors for Plant Conservation
Published: 2026-03-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Because of their abundance and sessile nature, plants often blend into the landscape, which can lead many people to be unaware of, uniformed, or uninterested in them. This phenomenon, known as “Plant Awareness Disparity” (PAD), contributes to a lack of support for the conservation of plants relative to animals. Strategies for mitigating PAD across diverse demographic groups remain poorly [...]
Permissible Spite: Kin Selection, Demography, and the Inverse Hamiltonian Equation
Published: 2026-03-19
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Systems Biology
This article revisits Hamilton’s rule by proposing an inverted formulation to evaluate the evolutionary permissibility of spiteful behavior within kin-based populations. We formalize a reverse Hamiltonian equation and apply replicator dynamics to investigate the demographic and genetic conditions under which within group aggression may become evolutionarily stable. The model shows that in [...]
Comments on “Mateus-Aguilar, B., Díaz-Salazar, A. F., Andrade-Rivas, F., Batista, N. M., Cárdenas-Navarrete, A., Arenas, A. D., ... & Echeverri, A. (2025). Assessing Biocultural Diversity Across Scales Using Ecological Indicators. Ecological Indicators, 176, 113616.”
Published: 2026-02-11
Subjects: Anthropology, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Closing the border on Australia’s domestic elephant ivory trade
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Law, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Australia’s domestic market for elephant (Elephantidae ssp.) ivory remains active online, despite long-standing international controls and pledges to close domestic trade. We conducted snapshot monitoring of surface-web vendors (online auction houses and webstores with ‘buy-it-now’ payment options) and a survey of Facebook Marketplace posts made between January and June 2025, sampled every two [...]
Factors influencing the use of scientific evidence in conservation practice and policy: insights from a systematic map
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Evidence-based conservation can lead to better outcomes for biodiversity, through the integration of scientific evidence with other forms of knowledge to make transparent and effective decisions. However, despite efforts to promote evidence-based practice, many management and policy decisions do not incorporate scientific information. To strengthen the interface between science and [...]
SPECIES OF PASSIONATE INTEREST: Practicing Biocultural Conservation and Eco-social Transformation Together
Published: 2026-01-27
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Species of Passionate Interest expands on the concept of the "cultural keystone species," reviewing its intellectual history and proposing future applications in the field of biodiversity conservation. The paper critiques the classic view of the "keystone" species in Western conservation science, emphasizing the need to consider the dynamic cultural context and the diversity of emotional [...]
Reversing the gaze on nature in an era of technological innovation
Published: 2026-01-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How nature is understood and ‘seen’ by governing institutions influences how it is managed. The rise of new digital and remote sensing technologies has reinforced a global gaze ‘from above’ that separates the seer from the people and places seen. This gaze has generated critical data on global climate and biodiversity trends and informed ambitious environmental targets. Yet it also obscures a [...]
The evolution of niche construction in social species
Published: 2026-01-19
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Niche construction is a behaviour where the local environment is changed by individuals, often to improve reproductive success (e.g. nests or burrows). In social species, the niche construction behaviour of an individual also changes the local environment of others. In such cases, individuals could cheat and not contribute to the social behaviour, but instead make use of the efforts of others. [...]
Data aggregation blurs inferred temporal trends in bird sampling
Published: 2026-01-09
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Ellis-Soto et al. (2023, Nat Hum Behav) reported that disparity in bird-sampling density between U.S. city neighbourhoods rated as safe versus risky for real estate investment (a practice known as “redlining”) increased by 35.6% between 2000 and 2020. We show that this reported trend arises from data aggregation and linear model misspecification. Using the original neighbourhood-level yearly data [...]
Personality tips the scale: How individual differences in exploration shape behavioural and hormonal adjustment to different environments
Published: 2026-01-07
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Individuals show consistent differences in their behaviour across time and/or context, usually referred to as animal personality in behavioural ecology. These inter-individual differences raised the question if animals of different personalities also vary in how they adjust to certain environmental conditions. In the present study, we aimed to investigate personality-dependent adjustments to [...]
Coalitions matter for both men and women: Insights from three subsistence communities in southwest Ethiopia
Published: 2025-12-24
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Coalitions are a widespread cooperative strategy across mammals, including humans. They may be transient, occurring in one-off interactions, or more commonly, as part of long-term relationships including friendship. In subsistence-based societies, research on coalitions has primarily focused on men, leaving women comparatively understudied. To address this gap, we examined coalitions across [...]