Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
From pixels to plants: linking remotely sensed habitat data to roe deer diet from DNA metabarcoding in Scottish forest landscapes
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Understanding how landscape characteristics influence herbivore diet selection is fundamental to predicting ecological impacts and developing effective wildlife management strategies. We linked remotely sensed habitat data and dietary DNA metabarcoding to test whether landcover classifications can explain variation in European roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) diet across Scottish forest landscapes. [...]
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 [...]
From Nesting to Emergence at a Half-Century Communal Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta) Nesting Site: Species Phenology Across a Full Protected Season, Hatchling Consumption by Yellow Jackets (Vespula sp.), and Nest Protection by Overlaid Netting
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Long-term records that connect a turtle nesting season to the hatchling emergence it produces, at daily resolution and across multiple species, are rare. At a communal nesting site in Washburn County, Wisconsin, protected and monitored by our family for over five decades, we surveyed both ends of the 2026 season daily: the nesting period (25 May–13 June; 171 turtle sightings of five species, 143 [...]
Uptake of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in plants: A systematic review and meta-analysis research protocol
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) transfer from contaminated environments into plants, contributing to food chain accumulation and an exposure pathway central to human health risk assessment. Regulatory risk assessments commonly use plant bioconcentration factors (BCFs) to estimate dietary exposure and support the derivation of health-based guideline values, yet they have not been [...]
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 [...]
Increase, decrease, or both: A systematic review of mosquito population response to floods
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Parasitic Diseases, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Virus Diseases
Floods are increasing in frequency and severity under the ongoing climate change and are widely reported to alter mosquito population dynamics. However, the direction, magnitude, and consistency of this effect across mosquito species and flood contexts remain poorly studied. This systematic review synthesizes empirical evidence on mosquito species population responses to disastrous flood events [...]
Five First Records from a Half-Century Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta) Communal Nesting Aggregation: Predation, Mortality, Nesting Phenology, and a Decade of Nest Protection
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
We describe a half-century communal nesting aggregation of the Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta), a species of conservation concern, at a single restored prairie–savanna site along a tributary of the Namekagon River in northwest Wisconsin, USA, monitored since the 1970s and protected with successive structures since 2015, and we report five natural-history findings from the site that are, to our [...]
iPhone Lidar Can Accurately Capture Fine-Scale Understorey Vegetation Structure
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Complex vegetation structure increases ecosystem resilience, but fine-scale understorey vegetation is often overlooked in monitoring protocols despite subtle variation impacting overall diversity. iPhone lidar has placed cost effective and portable remote sensing technology in the pockets of researchers, farmers, practitioners, and citizens worldwide to conduct continuous monitoring and improve [...]
Reproduction is more sensitive to warming than adult lifespan across invertebrates
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Studies estimating the effect of temperature on wild animal populations typically focus on survival as a proxy for population health. However, high and low temperatures can also negatively influence animal reproduction, and recent work suggests that the thermal sensitivity of reproduction is more important for population persistence that the thermal sensitivity of survival in some species groups. [...]
Impact of warming on functional traits of a keystone grazer in Arctic lakes
Published: 2026-08-07
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Temperature rise is one of the most pronounced abiotic changes currently affecting Αrctic ecosystems. Knowledge about the adaptation capacity of their key species is urgently needed to better understand the ecological consequences for these sentinel ecosystems. Previous work on a keystone zooplankton grazer, the obligatory parthenogenetic Daphnia pulicaria, from a lake in South-West Greenland [...]
Dark invasions as cryptic components of biological invasions
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Understanding and managing biological invasions typically requires knowledge of species records, known impacts, recognized pathways and definitions of non-native status, yet this information is rarely complete or without uncertainties. We develop the concept of dark invasions to describe a suite of hidden or underacknowledged aspects of biological invasions that are rarely quantified because [...]
Bias and complementarity in species occurrence data from citizen science, museum, and social media collections
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Effective biodiversity policy and spatial planning depend on species occurrence data. Yet data that informs conservation decisions typically originate from heterogeneous sources that potentially introduce systematic biases that shape downstream ecological inference and policy outcomes. To explore these potential biases, we analysed reptile location data from Bangladesh and India – a mega-diverse [...]
The Global Ecosystems Atlas: comprehensive and systematic mapping of Earth's ecosystems
Published: 2026-07-31
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geography, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Halting and reversing biodiversity loss is central to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, yet a lack of consistent, spatially comprehensive data on ecosystem distributions has undermined our ability to monitor progress against its goals and targets. Here we introduce the Global Ecosystems Atlas initiative, convened by the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO) in [...]
More trees, more moths: how urban treescapes can help reverse moth declines
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Moths are undergoing widespread declines in abundance, biomass and diversity, with consequences for pollination, herbivory and trophic interactions. Yet moth conservation remains poorly integrated into biodiversity policy and practice, particularly in urban environments. Here, we argue that trees offer an underused, but very timely, opportunity to support urban moth communities. Trees provide [...]
Fire regime assumptions can drastically influence pyrodiversity-biodiversity relationships in heterogeneous forest landscapes
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Management, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Background. Higher spatio-temporal variation in fire regime attributes in fire-dominated landscapes (pyrodiversity) is thought to promote higher levels of biodiversity – the pyrodiversity-biodiversity hypothesis – yet this effect likely varies across taxa and systems. As a result, ecosystem-based management in heterogenous, fire-dominated forests requires understanding the strength and shape of [...]