Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Code review in practice: A checklist for computational reproducibility and collaborative research in ecology and evolution
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Ensuring that research, along with its data and code, is credible and remains accessible is crucial for advancing scientific knowledge—especially in ecology and evolutionary biology, where the climate crisis and biodiversity loss accelerate and demand urgent, transparent science. Yet, code is rarely shared alongside scientific publications, and when it is, unclear implementation and insufficient [...]
Dragon Kill Points: applying a transparent working template to relieve authorship stress
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Education, Engineering, Law, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The concept of authorship, while straightforward in theory, proves to be remarkably complex in practice. While existing frameworks provide a foundation for classifying and ranking authorship roles, conflicts still arise when contributions are ambiguous or poorly documented. To address these issues, we propose Dragon Kill Points, adapted from multiplayer gaming, which tracks individual [...]
Breaking Barriers: Dualistic Thinking in Religious and Social Contexts and its Environmental Impact
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Breaking Barriers: Dualistic Thinking in Religious and Social Contexts and its environmental impact explores the intricate relationship between dualistic thinking, influenced by religious and societal norms, and its role in perpetuating environmental degradation. Through an interdisciplinary analysis spanning history and philosophy, it investigates how entrenched dualistic frameworks, such as [...]
Overcoming “doom and gloom”: Envisioning desirable futures for Arctic biodiversity
Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
We co-created visions of desirable futures for Arctic biodiversity during a workshop which included representatives from academia, Indigenous Peoples, business and policy-making. Appreciating our diverse perspectives, we identified key actions that would enable the positive outcomes shared in our visions: boosting education, rethinking Arctic biodiversity governance, elevating the voices of [...]
Shaped from an early age: behavioural and hormonal phenotypes in juvenile male guinea pigs living in distinct social environments
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Behavioural plasticity enables individuals to vary their behaviour in response to different environmental conditions. As the social environment can change at any time, individuals need to be able to adjust throughout their lives. Our goal was therefore to elucidate when and how behavioural and hormonal adjustments in guinea pigs occur. We focused on juvenility, an important developmental phase [...]
Biocultural Families and Leaders: New Metaphors, Methods and Members for Environmental Connectivity in Unama'ki
Published: 2025-01-09
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this community inquiry into the importance of connectivity to the newly established Kluskap Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA) in Unama'ki (Cape Breton), our team partnered with local knowledge-holders to develop locally appropriate definitions and metaphors for connectivity along with methodologies for understanding and visualizing its concrete manifestations, including by [...]
Lights tuned to the avian eye result in early detection and escape from an approaching aircraft
Published: 2025-01-08
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Behavioral Neurobiology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Collisions between birds and aircraft are a global problem. We identified different behavioral parameters affecting the probability of escape to an approaching aircraft, which is a function of the probability that the animal initiates an escape response (probability of reaction) and the probability of having enough time to escape (probability of sufficient time). Lights of high chromatic contrast [...]
One Earth + One Health: An agile, evolutionary, system-of-systems, convergence paradigm for societal challenges of the Anthropocene
Published: 2024-12-06
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Evolutionary mechanisms enabled humans to profoundly transform Earth systems. Because the resulting Anthropocene systems are highly interdependent and dynamically evolving, often with accelerating rates of cultural and technological evolution, the ensuing family of societal challenges must be framed and addressed in a holistic fashion. An agile, evolutionary, system-of-systems, convergence [...]
Evolutionary principles shape the health of humanity as a planetary-scale organism
Published: 2024-12-02
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A study of human social systems at planetary scale examines whether our technology, economy, culture, and flows of information are component-processes in a unified, living system. Through a biological lens of structure, function, and geographic mapping of social systems, we consider this total human ecosystem from evolutionary and developmental principles. The health of this system depends on its [...]
Why do people misperceive long-term environmental change?
Published: 2024-10-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Environmental sciences seek to provide an unbiased quantitative and mechanistic basis for decision making, but conservation and management are often driven by personal perception of the environment. This, in turn, is made up of personal experiences, information exposure, personal values and beliefs. When documented changes in the natural world are in dissonance with people’s perceptions, [...]
Cooperation, status, and altruism in a mixed society of Amazonian parrots
Published: 2024-10-16
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Parrots are a highly intelligent taxon whose complex behaviors in wild societies require description. Here we observed 12 species of parrots, macaws, and parakeets in mixed flocks foraging on exposed cliffs in southeast Perú. For each species, we developed a single bootstrapped index of sociality from 9 derived metrics of abundance, chronology, functional roles, and agonistic interactions. This [...]
Local knowledge enhances the sustainability of interconnected fisheries
Published: 2024-10-08
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Global demand for natural resources challenges the sustainability of small-scale fisheries. Fisheries Co-Management (FCM), where management is shared between the government and locals, is crucial for maintaining viable fish populations while mitigating market pressures and illegal fishing. Using a data-informed model applied to a fish metapopulation network, we contrasted the effects of various [...]
Wildfire exposure and health outcomes: An umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses
Published: 2024-10-08
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Introduction: Wildfires are a growing concern due to their significant impact on wildlife, air quality, and health, and are increasing under climate change. Although several systematic reviews have explored the relationship between wildfire smoke and human health outcomes, a comprehensive overview of the overall epidemiological evidence remains needed. Thus, this umbrella review aimed to [...]
An introduction to generative network models and how they may be used to study animal sociality
Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Social networks constitute an important approach in the study of animal social behaviour. So far, focus has been on statistical analysis of animal social network structures. However, social networks can also be studied by generative network models - procedures that create simulated network structures. These models play a key role in wider network science, but despite occasional use, have not yet [...]
Not by selection alone: expanding the scope of gene-culture coevolution
Published: 2024-09-05
Subjects: Anthropology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Gene-culture coevolution (GCC) - an ambitious synthesis of biological and social sciences - is often used to explain the evolution of key human traits. Despite the framework’s broad conceptual appeal however, empirical evidence is often perceived as limited to a few key examples like lactase persistence. We argue this apparent gap between theoretical appeal and empirical evidence stems [...]