Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Different Beta-Diversity Frameworks Reveal Contrasting Roles of Species Abundance Distributions and Spatial Aggregation
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Aim Determining why community composition changes from place-to-place (spatial β-diversity) is central to advancing biodiversity theory and conservation of threatened species. Spatial β-diversity can occur most simply due to random sampling effects from the larger species-pool, such as the random placement and distribution of individuals and species. However, ecological processes can also [...]
Behavioural strategy and predator control: a coupled evolutionary predator-prey model for kiwi conservation in New Zealand
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Behavior and Ethology, Dynamic Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Population Biology
Conservation management of endangered species can be enhanced by quantitative frameworks that simultaneously model behavioural adaptations alongside population dynamics. This paper presents a Coupled Evolutionary Predator-Prey Model (CEPPM) that integrates replicator dynamics from Evolutionary Game Theory with an extended Lotka-Volterra predator-prey framework, applied to kiwi (Apteryx spp.) [...]
Does roadless rule? Social-ecological consequences of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Roadless Rule, established 25 years ago to maintain 58.5 million federal forest acres in roadless condition, is one of the U.S.’s most expansive and debated natural resource experiments. We synthesize research on the effects of the Roadless Rule on biodiversity, wildfire, forest and watershed health, and economics to guide current and future decision making. Research shows the Roadless Rule [...]
Modelling irruptive species with hybrid machine learning: A case study of crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks on the Great Barrier Reef
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Irruptions consist of rapid and severe increases in abundance, which for some species can result in significant economic and environmental damage. Forecasting the timing and location of these irruptions is crucial for effective management, however is difficult due to the complexity of the ecosystems in which they occur and the conditions under which they arise. Hybrid machine learning (ML) [...]
wildtag.ai: an open-access end-to-end offline AI-assisted desktop application for managing camera trap projects
Published: 2026-09-01
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Bioinformatics, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Camera traps generate massive volumes of data, yet their decision-support potential is diluted by the bottleneck of manual processing. Automated classification has largely solved this, but classification alone does not remove the barriers to adoption: it must be coupled with the means to turn predictions into a verified, shareable dataset, which no existing tool does end-to-end, offline, and [...]
Measure what the coarsening removes: a precondition for interpreting spatial-resolution comparisons in ecological models
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Ecological models increasingly use "scale-free" downscaled climate surfaces, assuming finer resolution predicts local response better. Even a comparison that varies resolution alone can fail to test it: over a small extent, coarsening barely changes the predictors. I provide a diagnostic detecting this before a model is fitted. Though the variance decomposition is classical, calibrating it [...]
Revisiting Taylor's law, rediscovering Smith's law: A dual framework for scaling heterogeneity
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Taylor's (1961) power law (TPL)—variance scales with mean density—originated in agricultural entomology but now spans the natural and social sciences and even the humanities. Cited over 8,000 times and featured in Nature for decades, its reach far exceeds its ecological origins. Yet TPL has been dormant in Nature for the past two decades, though it remains active in PNAS. Smith's (1938) law [...]
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 [...]
Insect movement and spatial dynamics determine trap crop effectiveness
Published: 2026-07-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Trap cropping diverts pest pressure away from cash crops, yet its effectiveness depends on pest movement behaviour and the retention or removal processes that occur after insects reach trap plants. We develop a one-dimensional movement-based modelling framework in which pest trajectories follow a biased correlated random walk within a spatially structured field containing trap-crop interception [...]
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 [...]
Predicting substrate size at a watershed scale to inform conservation planning for a declining salmonid species
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Biology, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Good quality spawning habitat is critical for fish embryo development, survival, and overall population productivity. Appropriate riverbed substrate size is particularly important for riverine-spawning salmonids but the availability of suitable substrate may vary across a watershed. Predicting substrate size at watershed extents may therefore be critical to inform management and conservation of [...]
Navigating Spatial Trade-offs in Restoration Planning: A Multi-Objective Optimization Framework Integrating Ecological Feasibility
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecosystem restoration requires decision-support tools capable of balancing ecological benefits under limited resources while explicitly accounting for the long-term likelihood of restoration success. Despite its recognized importance, ecological feasibility has rarely been formulated as an optimization objective in spatial planning, typically being treated only as a constraint or biophysical [...]
Bayesian adaptive design for citizen science data collection: Exploring tensions between data and design
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
1. Bayesian adaptive design can be applied in spatial settings where future survey locations need to be selected based on already available data. An important use case of adaptive design is the recommendation of locations for opportunistic, citizen science collection of species observation data, where some areas are already overrepresented and others are severely undersampled. 2. This work [...]
When Policy Shapes Selection: Anticipating Evolutionary Feedbacks in Conservation
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Applied ecology and conservation increasingly operate in systems where ecological and evolutionary processes are tightly coupled and can unfold on management-relevant timescales, yet most policy still treats populations as evolutionarily static. As a result, interventions often generate unintended outcomes, from resistance evolution and harvest-induced trait shifts to hidden losses of adaptive [...]
Lead and slant on the geometry of coiling in gastropods
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Molluscan shells have been studied with various geometric models. Here I show that lead angle, the defining slope of a conical helix, emerges as a more useful parameter in morphometric analyses and (adaptationist) interpretation of covariation in coiling parameters. The widely used apical semiangle becomes redundant and uninformative, a passive consequence of taxon-specific lead angles and [...]