Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Population Biology
Progress toward sustainable management of marine crustacean fisheries
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Population Biology
Marine crustacean capture fisheries have been contributing increasingly more to global aquatic food production in recent decades, helping secure socioeconomic benefits. In the past decade the landings of marine crustaceans rose by more than 67% while expanding spatially and taxonomically, doubling their contribution to global fisheries landings. Although efforts to improve the data collection [...]
Trapper Citizen Science: an open-source camera trap platform for citizen science in wildlife research and management
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Computational Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Effective wildlife monitoring is essential for biodiversity conservation and sustainable management, particularly in the face of rapid environmental changes and human-wildlife interactions. Advances in camera trap technology and citizen science, here used to denote non-professional involvement in scientific research, irrespective of citizenship status, have revolutionized ecological data [...]
National-scale estimates of mammal species abundance in Italy for the Habitat Directive reporting
Published: 2025-08-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
This report describes the methodological frameworks developed in collaboration with ATIt ETS (https://www.mammiferi.org) to estimate the abundance of mammal populations at the scale of Italy for the species listed under Annexes II, IV, and V of the Habitats Directive. For each species, the estimation methodology was defined based on the availability and quality of data supplied by the individual [...]
Tracking the hidden niches: Movement-based insights into northern lapwing intraspecific variation and conservation
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Zoology
Global monitoring data reveal farmland bird population declines, primarily driven by agricultural intensification, chemical inputs, and climate shifts. The northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus) is a farmland bird that exemplifies this decline across Europe. The aim of this study is to quantify intraspecific variation in habitat selection and evaluate the degree of behavioural variance in resource [...]
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 [...]
Assessing direct effects of insect change on insectivore populations in the United Kingdom
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
1. Declines in insect abundance are a cause for concern, with potential downstream impacts on the function of ecosystems. Insects are key food resources for insectivorous vertebrates, with evidence that declines in these species could be driven by changing insect abundance. 2. Quantifying the direct effect of insect abundance on vertebrate population dynamics is challenging especially at large [...]
Microevolutionary Responses to Seasonality Contribute to the Latitudinal Biodiversity Gradient
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Evolution, Genetics, Population Biology
The latitudinal gradient in species richness is one of ecology’s oldest observed patterns, yet the mechanisms maintaining it remain debated. One prominent explanation links seasonality to the evolution of broad physiological tolerances, creating evolutionary conditions that impede population divergence and speciation. We tested whether seasonality leaves detectable signatures in the genetic [...]
Demographic causes of the pesticide crash in the peregrine falcon
Published: 2025-06-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Population crashes in many avian predators during the 1950–70s, caused by organochlorine pesticides, belong to the most spectacular cases in the history of conservation and ecotoxicology. Negative effects of DDT on eggshell thickness, leading to egg breakage and declining productivity, are well-documented. In addition, cyclodiene pesticides such as Dieldrin were strongly suspected to contribute [...]
The Indian Street dog crisis and multispecies coexistence in tropical urban futures
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Cities in the Global South struggle with human-animal coexistence conundrums, e.g., in South Asia, old and new collide: people raise livestock informally and feed free-ranging animals within heterogeneously developed, juxtaposed patches. Digital economies boom amidst threats from waste piles linked with zoonotic diseases and conflicts, exemplified by the free-ranging dog crises in India. [...]
Genomic data confirms that mutation cannot restore genetic diversity lost through population bottlenecks
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Population Biology
Maintaining within-species genetic diversity is a critical goal of biodiversity conservation as it determines a species’ ability to adapt to environmental change. Without human intervention, isolated populations can only recover genetic diversity post-bottleneck through the accumulation of new mutations over evolutionary timescales. Using recent estimates of mutation rates from major genomic [...]
Strong impact of the recent Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza panzootic on population dynamics of a long-lived bird
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Population Biology
Since 2020, the spread of a new Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza virus (HPAIV-H5N1) has triggered the most severe wildlife panzootic ever recorded, with suspected population crashes in hundreds of species. Yet, no study has evaluated the demographic mechanisms underlying these declines. We used Integrated Population Models and population forecasts to evaluate the demographic impact of HPAIV-H5N1 [...]
Global population delineations and conservation status for marine turtles: tools, methods, and guidance
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Marine Biology, Other Life Sciences, Population Biology
Negative effects of climate change and fishing activities on Alaskan seabird populations (2002-2011)
Published: 2025-05-12
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 [...]
Decline of the globally rare old-growth specklebelly lichen, Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis, and its implications for temperate rainforest conservation
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology
Epiphytic lichens are key components of temperate rainforests, where they contribute to forest hydrology, nutrient cycles, food webs, and overall biomass and biodiversity. Despite their ecological importance and sensitivity to environmental change few protections exist for lichen conservation and management. Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis, or old-growth specklebelly lichen, is considered an [...]
Spatially varying population indices
Published: 2025-04-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Population Biology
Large scale monitoring is fundamental for reliably tracking the fate of animal populations under changing environments and land-use practices. A common application of large scale population monitoring data is to produce indices of temporal change in species abundances, which are used in environmental policy assessments of species and biodiversity statuses. For index estimation, spatio-temporal [...]