Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Strategic conservation of tropical insects
Published: 2025-07-15
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 [...]
Light color and nutrient availability alter trophic transfer from algae to zooplankton
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Freshwater plankton communities experience both natural variation of light color and nutrient availability and shifts due to eutrophication and brownification. These changes can alter algal community structure, but whether variation of light color impacts trophic transfer from algae to zooplankton is unknown because most research ignores color and focuses on light intensity. We used microcosms [...]
Non-native grass invasion drives biodiversity loss after a single fire in a semi-arid shrubland
Published: 2025-06-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Desert Ecology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
In the United States Great Basin, invasive annual grasses have initiated a novel grass-fire cycle that has transformed vast areas of semi-arid shrublands into non-native annual grasslands that now burn frequently. After the initial transformation, the system is so fire prone that it is difficult to find areas that have not burned repeatedly. We evaluated how the ecosystem responds in the absence [...]
State-space models and inference approaches for aquatic animal tracking with passive acoustic telemetry and biologging sensors
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Passive acoustic telemetry systems are widely deployed to track animals in aquatic environments. However, investments in integrative methods of data analysis have remained comparatively limited, with current workflows typically considering individual movements separately from space use, home ranges and residency. 2. This review presents a unifying perspective that bridges this divide. We [...]
Negative effects of climate change and fishing activities on Alaskan seabird populations (2002-2011)
Published: 2025-05-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Seabird populations along the Alaskan coast have been rapidly declining due to anthropogenic climate change and other associated factors. This study examines the effects of sea surface temperature (SST) and fishing activity on the abundance of Alaskan seabird species. We downloaded bird observation data from the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) and then matched the seabird [...]
The ecological relevance of fast-cycling mineral-associated organic matter – a dynamic pool of 'persistent’ soil carbon and nitrogen
Published: 2025-05-08
Subjects: Agriculture, Biogeochemistry, Soil Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Longstanding theories and models classify mineral-associated organic matter (MAOM) as the large (~60%) but slow-cycling and persistent portion of the soil organic matter (SOM) pool. Strong physico-chemical interactions and diffusion limitations restrict the turnover of MAOM, allowing carbon and nitrogen bound therein to persist in soil for as long as centuries to millennia. However, MAOM is a [...]
Acclimation to fluctuating hypoxia alters activity and escape performance, but not metabolism, in guppies
Published: 2025-05-02
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Organisms living in fluctuating environments must cope with constantly changing conditions. Here we investigated how acclimation to either fluctuating or constant oxygen affects behavioural and physiological responses to hypoxia in guppies (Poecilia reticulata). Guppies were acclimated to either fluctuating hypoxia (100% of air saturation during day to 40% at night) or constant normoxia (100% of [...]
Creating woodland through natural processes: Current understanding and knowledge gaps in Great Britain
Published: 2025-04-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Creating new woodlands through natural processes, as opposed to traditional tree planting, is expected to result in more structurally diverse, locally-adapted woodlands that enhance the resilience of existing treescapes. However, the outcomes of natural colonisation can be variable, and there is still considerable uncertainty around the ecological processes involved. 2. To address knowledge [...]
Key Biodiversity Areas and Important Plant Areas can help build ecologically representative Protected and Conserved Area networks to meet 30-by-30
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Expanding the global network of Protected and Conserved Areas (PCAs) to cover 30% of the planet by 2030 (30-by-30) is mandated in the Global Biodiversity Framework. However, if PCA expansion is undertaken hastily, it risks inadvertently overlooking important species or ecosystems and entrenching existing spatial and taxonomic biases. We investigate, across 28 countries, whether sites identified [...]
Disentangling Landscape Heterogeneity: Compositional, Configurational, Vertical, and Temporal Heterogeneity
Published: 2025-04-14
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Aim Landscape heterogeneity is a key driver of biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and resilience. However, the complex relationships among different components of heterogeneity—compositional, configurational, vertical, and temporal—remain underexplored for large areas such as at the national scale. This study examines the associations among multiple landscape heterogeneity components across [...]
Forest restoration treatments increase native plant diversity but open the door to invasion in the Colorado Front Range
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Forest Biology, Forest Management, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Forest restoration treatments in dry conifer forests of the western United States are often done with objectives to move current forest structure toward historical conditions and, in turn, increase the system’s resilience to future wildfires. But little is known about their effects on understory plant composition, particularly over the long-term. This is especially true in the Colorado Front [...]
Diurnal temperature range drives understory plant community composition in micro-climatically complex temperate forests
Published: 2025-04-03
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Diurnal temperature range (DTR) is hypothesized to be a key driver of plant community assembly, because areas with high DTR are exposed to both extreme high and extreme low temperatures on a daily basis. We established networks of temperature and relative humidity sensors along DTR gradients in two montane forest basins, and conducted plant surveys around each sensor (n=46). We examined which [...]