Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Understanding the socio-ecological system (SES) of Arctic Reindeer husbandry
Published: 2025-10-09
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Arctic reindeer husbandry is a socio-ecological system (SES) of vital regional significance that is naturally connected to the cultural heritage, spiritual identity, and food security of Indigenous peoples throughout the Circumpolar North. This review integrates the multifaceted challenges and adaptive strategies of this complex adaptive system (CAS), which is increasingly exposed to accelerating [...]
Extensive climate-induced range shifts in butterflies across the globe
Published: 2025-09-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ongoing global change is leading to the widespread redistribution of species1,2. Assessments of shifts in species geographic ranges, however, remain taxonomically biased and geographically limited2, especially for insects. We conducted a global synthesis on butterfly range shifts using a combination of multi-lingual review in 15 languages and expert assessments, compiling data on range shifts for [...]
Spatial networks of habitats, populations, and communities: connecting approaches to keep cutting edges
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Purpose of review: Spatial networks are extensively used in ecology to represent exchanges among landscape features (e.g., habitat patches, river segments) or biological entities (e.g., individuals, populations, communities). I reviewed the literature produced in the past 25 years using these networks. Distinct types of spatial networks have emerged in several subfields of ecology. I aimed to [...]
A high-resolution physiological timeseries uncovers strong but variable seasonal acclimation of thermal limits in a copepod community
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
How a community responds to warming depends on both intra-specific variation in thermal limits and variation in acclimation capacity across community members. These factors, however, are often overlooked, leading to uncertainties about how climate change affects biodiversity. In temperate regions, communities are exposed to large seasonal temperature fluctuations, providing an opportunity to [...]
Passive acoustic monitoring and deep learning reveal spatiotemporal patterns in gibbon calling behaviour associated with habitat and climate variables
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
1. Understanding the basic ecology of endangered species is essential for effective conservation, yet this remains challenging for elusive species inhabiting tropical forests. For the endangered Bornean white-bearded gibbon (Hylobates albibarbis), basic ecological information remains limited. Most research on the species is restricted to peat swamp forests, while little is known from other forest [...]
Rediscovering lost Cenozoic tree diversity in Western and Central Europe
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Management, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Paleoclimatic changes during the late Cenozoic led to substantial losses of tree diversity in Western and Central Europe. A complete overview of what taxa were lost, the timing of these losses, and their implications for the adaptation of the region’s forest ecosystems to ongoing climate change is needed. Here, we compiled a dataset of fossil occurrences of tree genera from Western and Central [...]
Connectivity, Fire, and Land Use: Understanding Platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) Persistence in Fragmented Watersheds
Published: 2025-08-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Aim: Effective biodiversity conservation requires improved understanding of species distributions, and of the influence of threatening processes on those distributions. This is particularly important for freshwater species, which are difficult to survey even as they are exposed to disproportionately high levels of threat. Here we address this issue for the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), an [...]
Exploring the Integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Artificial Intelligence to Mitigate Human-Wildlife Conflict in Kerala, India
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Increasing human-wildlife conflict (HWC) in forest-fringe landscapes necessitates innovative and culturally acceptable mitigation strategies. This note proposes integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mitigate HWC in Kerala. The proposition aims to translate African rural traditional knowledge of using alarm calls of Guinea fowls (Numida meleagris) [...]
Causal models as a scientific framework for next-generation ecosystem and climate-linked stock assessments
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Rapid changes in marine ecosystems highlight the need to account for time-varying productivity in stock assessment models used to support fisheries management. Common approaches incorporate annual variation or regress processes like recruitment, natural mortality, or growth on environmental covariates. While the latter represents a step towards biological realism, it often fails accounting for [...]
Social-ecological networks in urban ecology research
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Urban Studies and Planning
Urban ecosystems are complex and dynamic, shaped by feedback loops between social and ecological components. However, urban ecology requires tools to unravel this complexity. Social-ecological networks (SENs) offer a conceptual and analytical framework by integrating network theory to understand the relationships between and within social-ecological systems. Here, we integrate perspectives from [...]
A comprehensive dataset on pollinator diversity, visitation rates, individual-based traits, and pollination success across four plant species in an urban garden experiment
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
This dataset presents flower visitation frequency, pollinator richness, and direct measures of pollination success for four focal plant species from a field experiment in 24 home gardens in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. The home gardens were selected to vary independently in local flowering species richness and the proportion of impervious surface in a 500-m radius around the garden, a common [...]
Strategic conservation of tropical insects
Published: 2025-07-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Insect species are declining globally, yet they are often overlooked in biodiversity conservation measures. The tropics harbour > 80% of all insect species; however, information on their ecology and conservation status is largely lacking. It is imperative to identify solutions to the issues of data availability and integration of scientific findings with conservation policy for tropical [...]
Catalysing community-led local nature recovery with opportunity mapping: lessons from the Oxfordshire Treescape Project
Published: 2025-07-11
Subjects: Nature and Society Relations, Spatial Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Background. The UK has ambitious nature recovery targets. Local communities and land managers have knowledge, expertise, and capacity to support place-based nature recovery, making them well-placed to help deliver these goals. We explore how these groups can be supported in nature recovery plans that combine their local knowledge with complex ecological data, using Oxfordshire Treescape [...]
Social media data reveal novel habitats for invasive species
Published: 2025-07-03
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Invasive alien species pose significant threats to biodiversity, yet their distributions remain poorly documented across much of the tropics. Using Bangladesh, a megapopulated tropical country, we combine species distribution data from Facebook and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) to evaluate how data integration improves invasive alien species distribution. Our compiled [...]
Hotspots, refuges, and rising risk: mapping tropical hunting pressure across space and time
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Hunting is a major driver of global extinctions, yet the spatial footprint and temporal trend of this pressure is lacking at global scale, limiting our ability to achieve international policy targets. Here, we present the first standardized global maps of hunting pressure across the tropics, based on a machine learning algorithm trained on 2,463 hunted and non-hunted tropical sites, spatially and [...]