Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Voluntary wheel use across animal taxa: motivation, enrichment, stereotypy and ethological interpretation
Published: 2026-08-14
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Exercise wheels are simple devices for recording animal movement, but they elicit surprisingly complex behaviours. In laboratory rodents, running wheels are key for studying voluntary exercise, circadian rhythms, motivation, energy balance, stress physiology and brain plasticity. Outside rodents, wheel-like devices have also been provided to rabbits, cats, squirrels, reptiles and invertebrates. [...]
Ecological Patterns in Mammalian Vocal Frequencies: Evidence Across Body Sizes and Habitats
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Vocalisations in mammals are an important sensory modality that is used for various purposes in communication, courtship, territorial display, navigation, prey detection, predator avoidance, reproduction, and social coordination. These various call functions are differentiated from each other through certain properties. Call spectral properties are influenced by anatomical constraints, especially [...]
Local Perceptions and Community Engagement in Conservation: Insights from Protected Areas in Guinea-Bissau
Published: 2026-07-20
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Understanding community perceptions of conservation initiatives is critical for evaluating their effectiveness and fostering long-term local engagement in biodiversity protection. This study employed a multidimensional framework to assess how socio-economic, governance, ecological, and future-oriented factors influence community engagement across four protected areas in Guinea-Bissau: Boé, [...]
From Scalable Biodiversity Measurement to Credible Biodiversity Metrics
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Business, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Economics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistical Models, Sustainability, Technology and Innovation
Governments struggle to develop effective policies to counter the decline of species and ecosystems. An obstacle to command-and-control and incentive-based mechanisms is that biodiversity is costly to measure, creating an information asymmetry in which firms and governments are incentivised to withhold information on adverse impacts. Using a principal-agent model, we show that credible reporting [...]
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 characterised 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: 2026-05-30
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 [...]
Modern dolphin training as a behavioral process: Learning, motivation, social interaction, and cooperative husbandry
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Dolphin training is widely used in zoological facilities for public presentations, husbandry, research, veterinary care, and daily management, yet many practical principles remain incompletely formalized in the scientific literature. This narrative, practice-based review integrates professional training knowledge with learning theory, cetacean cognition, applied animal behavior, veterinary care, [...]
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 [...]