Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Potential impacts of Ground-mounted photovoltaic panels on land cover and carbon storage in Norway – a scenario analysis
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Energy Policy, Environmental Policy, Life Sciences, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
In cool-temperate and boreal regions, ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) is rapidly emerging as a new land use, but planning-relevant evidence on land requirements, siting options, and land-system impacts remains limited. Based on an analysis of built and planned ground-mounted PV projects in Norway (n = 77), we quantify size, capacity density, land-cover composition and net greenhouse gas effects, [...]
Encounter behaviour shapes ecological distributions
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecology’s foundational models keep only the first moment of the stochastic distributions of encounters. Yet, encounter behaviour (how animals search, aggregate, hide and move) sets the whole distributional shape: zeros, variance, skew and, where particular behaviours build them, heavy tails. That shape decides vital rates, persistence and spatial pattern, because the rates involved are [...]
Areas of high conservation priority for threatened terrestrial vertebrates are governed by novel ecological conditions
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Over half of the terrestrial biosphere is exposed to highly novel conditions that differ from the historical state, resulting from anthropogenic pressures such as climate change, floristic disruption, and defaunation. Highly novel conditions result in unpredictable biodiversity outcomes, impacting the effectiveness of conservation and restoration actions and the ability for threatened species to [...]
Pine wilt disease as a holobiont disorder: microbiome assembly as a potential management target
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Pathology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Pine wilt disease (PWD), caused by the pinewood nematode (PWN) Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, continues to expand globally despite decades of pathogen-focused management. Here, we propose that disruption of microbiome assembly within the pine holobiont may contribute to disease progression and help explain variation in disease outcomes and responses to microbial interventions. Drawing on recent [...]
Canyoning simplifies benthic macroinvertebrate communities in Mediterranean canyons: evidence from Sierra y Cañones de Guara Natural Park
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Recreational activities in freshwater ecosystems are increasing worldwide, yet their ecological consequences remain poorly understood. Canyoning is one of the most popular nature-based sports in Mediterranean rivers, but quantitative assessments of its effects on aquatic communities are scarce, particularly in protected areas where conservation and recreation coexist. Here, we evaluated how [...]
The marine annelid trait manifesto: A call to rethink functional traits for ecological and conservation research
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
The Raunkiæran shortfall, defined as the scarcity of knowledge regarding species' attributes, represents one of the major obstacles to developing sound biodiversity conservation strategies and understanding ecological processes. In this context, despite the importance of marine annelids as dominant components of benthic ecosystems and key agents of marine ecosystem functioning, no comprehensive [...]
Composition or encounter? Decomposing the altitude and night-time damage premiums in wildlife strikes to civil aircraft in the United States
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Damaging wildlife strikes to civil aircraft are commoner above 500 ft and at night, patterns usually attributed to the animals involved. Using the FAA National Wildlife Strike Database (354,564 reports, 1990–2026), damage probabilities were directly standardised to a common taxon mix under three standard populations, separately for aircraft up to and above 5,700 kg. Standardisation removed 66 to [...]
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 [...]