Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Biodiversity footprint of public procurement in Finland
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Halting biodiversity loss requires systematic action from all sectors of society. The public sector is a significant actor globally in creating markets for goods and services, public procurement representing on average 13 – 20% of national gross domestic product. In this study, we assessed the biodiversity footprint of public procurement in Finland for years 2021 and 2022. We applied the [...]
Diversity in a fuzzy world: a review of models and measures
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Biological diversity metrics have evolved from simple species counts to measures that incorporate increasingly complex functional information. A critical aspect is that different families of diversity indices are grounded in distinct mathematical models for representing uncertainty, including classical set theory, probability theory, and fuzzy set theory, which shape what these measures can [...]
How does the rate of environmental change affect density-dependent population dynamics?
Published: 2026-01-19
Subjects: Dynamic Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Population Biology
Natural populations experience variable environments. Anthropogenically driven environmental change, in particular, is expected to impose trends on key demographic parameters such as reproduction and survival. Theoretical studies of how such environmental changes affect populations have highlighted dynamical phenomena including bifurcation-related tipping points – typically identified by [...]
Dorsal Fin Edge Proportions and Their Relationship to Swimming Strategy in Sharks
Published: 2025-12-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Dorsal fins play a critical role in elasmobranch locomotion by providing stability, reducing roll, and enhancing swimming efficiency. Variation in dorsal fin geometry may therefore reflect ecological niche and swimming strategy. This study quantitatively compares dorsal fin leading-to-lagging edge ratios in three shark species with differing ecological roles: the spiny dogfish (Squalus [...]
Reframing Population Genetic Structure as a Quantum Optimization Problem
Published: 2025-12-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Population genetic structure is commonly inferred using statistical and ordination-based methods that emphasize variance partitioning or likelihood-based clustering. While powerful, these approaches may undersample the full space of possible population partitions, particularly in systems characterized by weak genetic differentiation and high connectivity. Here, I present a proof-of-concept [...]
Predicting unobserved driver of regime shifts in social-ecological systems with universal dynamic equations
Published: 2025-12-15
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Ecosystems around the world are anticipated to undergo regime shifts as temperatures rise and other climatic and anthropogenic perturbations erode the resilience of present-day states. Forecasting these nonlinear ecosystem dynamics can help stakeholders to prepare for the associated rapid changes. One major challenge is that regime shifts can be difficult to predict when they are driven by [...]
A Satellite-based Approach to Investigating Eutrophication in Lakes Receiving Wastewater Treatment Effluent: A Case Study of Lake Windermere
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Excessive phosphorus from the sewer systems in the UK is a major contributor to eutrophication in freshwater bodies. Chlorophyll-a levels are widely used as a reliable indicator of phosphorus driven eutrophication, and satellite remote sensing provides an effective means of monitoring these dynamics at high spatial and temporal resolution. This study evaluated the utility of Sentinel-2 imagery in [...]
A chronosequence of human remains on soil microbial populations
Published: 2025-12-08
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Surficial human decomposition produces substantial and measurable shifts in soil chemistry and microbial composition. This decade-long investigation examined temporal changes beneath surface deposited human remains and identified strong microbial and chemical responses in the first twelve to twenty four months, including decreased microbial diversity, elevated soil nutrients and sustained [...]
Landscape drivers of population density of a vulnerable apex predator (Wilkerr/dingo)
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Apex predators shape ecosystems globally, yet robust monitoring that assesses the effects of management actions and environmental variation on their populations is challenging. The dingo, Australia’s largest terrestrial predator, is ecologically and culturally significant. In many parts of Australia, dingoes now exist in fragmented and isolated populations, and our understanding of how their [...]
Fossils for Future: the billion-dollar case for paleontology’s digital infrastructure
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Bioinformatics, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Arts and Humanities, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The digital revolution has transformed paleontology through the development of open-access, community-driven databases that underpin some of the most impactful research in biodiversity, climate change, and extinction dynamics. These systems safeguard high-effort, volunteered data and have revealed major macroevolutionary patterns, including mass extinctions. However, of 118 paleontological and [...]
An Exact Coarse-Graining Consistent Metapopulation Model
Published: 2025-08-20
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Different levels of coarse-graining are of paramount importance to understand how conclusions drawn from local studies can be made general and extrapolated to larger regions. We here investigate how consist metapopulation model are when considering different resolutions of the landscape matrix, i.e. different levels of coarse-graining. A formulation of the metapopulation model, taking into [...]
Eclipse of reason: debunking speculative anticipatory behavior in trees
Published: 2025-08-12
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Advancing plant behaviour research requires adherence to robust experimental designs, the formulation of alternative falsifiable hypotheses, sufficient replication, and stringent controls. These tenets safeguard the field from slipping into pseudoscience. A recent study by Chiolerio et al. (2025) claims that Picea abies trees collectively anticipate solar eclipses via electrome-based signalling. [...]
Five misunderstandings in animal social network analysis
Published: 2025-08-04
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Animal social network analysis has become central to behavioural ecology, offering powerful tools to explore the links between social behaviour and ecological or evolutionary processes. While rooted in the broader field of social network analysis, the methods used in animal studies have diverged from contemporary practices in the broader field. This divergence has led to conflicting guidance on [...]
okaapi: an R package for generating social networks based on trait preferences
Published: 2025-07-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Modelling of simulated networks with generative network models plays a central role for our understanding of the emergence and consequences of network structures. Accessible software that generates simulated networks based on relevant processes can facilitate the use of this important approach in behavioural ecology, and can help drive forward our understanding of animal social structures. Here [...]
Mathematical Perspectives on Rewilding
Published: 2025-07-08
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Achieving sustainable human-wildlife coexistence in well-functioning ecosystems is a vitally important and major challenge under global change. In response, rewilding is an emerging paradigm in ecosystem service provision through the re-establishment of natural ecological processes in self-sustaining ecosystems. Effective prediction of ecological changes in rewilding projects requires tools [...]