Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Agriculture
Evaluating the potential of molecular dietary analysis of predators for the detection of emerging plant pests
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Agriculture, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biosecurity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Genetics, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Monitoring plant pests is crucial for maximising yields across agricultural and forest production systems, but also for the mitigation of invasive species spread. Traditional monitoring methods, such as mass trapping and direct observation, scale poorly and introduce latency between collection, detection and response. Since many plant pests are frequently consumed by predators, molecular dietary [...]
Towards Nature Positive supply chains: From biodiversity impacts to organisational action
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Large organisations are critical to halting and reversing biodiversity loss, yet most of their impacts are hidden in complex supply chains. Robust strategies to fully identify, quantify, trace, and begin to mitigate these impacts remain rare. Here we present a generalisable workflow for assessing and addressing supply chain impacts on biodiversity and then apply it to the University of Oxford’s [...]
Insufficient environmental protection by the European regulatory framework for pesticides
Published: 2026-05-21
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Toxicology
Schriever et al. (2025) argue that environmental risk assessment of pesticides in the European Union is sufficiently protective and that regulatory thresholds are rarely exceeded. Here, we re-examine these claims based on new and previous evidence from monitoring, systematic reviews, and different types of field studies. The clear outcome is that measured pesticide concentrations frequently [...]
Quantitative Metabarcoding for Invertebrate Pest Monitoring and Management
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Agriculture, Entomology, Molecular Genetics
Invertebrate pests are one of the most significant threats to global agriculture. To monitor these pests, invertebrate trapping methods are commonly used to collect a representation of the diversity of pest species present in the ecosystem. Assessing and monitoring such diversity is key to inform pest management strategies, but due to the complexity of bulk trap samples from non-selective [...]
Robustness of pesticide and other environmental stressors as key drivers of stream macroinvertebrates in small agricultural catchments
Published: 2026-05-09
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Robustness of multiple stressor rankings is essential for credible ecotoxicological assessments and policy guidance. A widely cited study of 101 small agricultural streams across Germany identified pesticide mixtures as the dominant stressor for stream macroinvertebrates, but its analytical robustness has since been questioned. Using a fully reproducible workflow, we reanalysed this dataset to [...]
Representational limits in detecting ecological change
Published: 2026-04-29
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Biotechnology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Food Science, Forest Sciences, Genetics and Genomics, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Other Life Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Physiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Systems Biology
Detecting ecological change remains a persistent challenge, even in systems with extensive monitoring data and increasingly sophisticated analytical tools. Uncertainty is usually attributed to stochasticity, limited observations, or imperfect models. Here, I argue that an additional and largely overlooked constraint arises from representational limits: systematic ways in which graphs, indicators, [...]
Insect Pests on the Move: Climate, Soil, Land Use, and the Search for Contingent Generality
Published: 2026-02-09
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Climate change is reshaping the geographic distributions of insect pests, with major consequences for agriculture, forestry, and ecosystem stability. Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used to project these changes, yet most rely primarily on climatic predictors and implicitly assume a degree of generality in species responses that may not hold across diverse taxa. Here, we evaluate [...]
The conditional ecology of pest suppression: A general mechanistic framework for predicting landscape effects on biological control
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Landscape heterogeneity often increases natural enemy abundance, yet its effects on crop pest suppression are strikingly inconsistent across empirical studies. We developed a trait-based simulation framework to identify the general mechanisms linking landscape structure to realized pest load. Across >150 in silico experiments, we show that landscape attributes influence biological control by [...]
One dataset, four meta-analyses: synthesising mean effects, within-population variability, and between-population heterogeneity in ecology
Published: 2026-01-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ecological syntheses (meta-analysis) usually ask "what is the average effect?", but many ecological questions also depend on whether outcomes become more or less variable and whether effects are predictable across contexts. We show how the same dataset can support a coherent workflow that separates: (i) within-population variability (dispersion among individuals or sampling units inside studies) [...]
Understanding the dimensions and gaps in wildlife health surveillance for zoonotic risk management
Published: 2026-01-24
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Immunology and Infectious Disease
Following the Covid 19 pandemic, One Health has been a topic of increasing global awareness, with the development of various global strategies and action plans to manage and counteract risks as well as identify potential risks. However, despite these calls for action, little work has been conducted to establish a global baseline on policies related to One Health, particularly dealing with the [...]
The state of evidence on salmon farming: an umbrella review
Published: 2025-12-29
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences
Background: The global expansion of salmon aquaculture has transformed marine food systems, offering economic benefits while amplifying environmental and socio-economic challenges. The shift from wild-caught to farmed salmon has led to widespread concerns, including disease transmission, genetic introgression, pollution, and conflicts with Indigenous communities. Additionally, salmon feed supply [...]
Quantifying impacts of policy and practice interventions on biodiversity and climate
Published: 2025-11-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
There is urgent demand for ecosystem management interventions – targeted actions through policies and practices – that meaningfully address climate change and biodiversity loss while sustaining ecosystem delivery of water, food, fibre and fuel. Rigorous quantification of intervention outcomes is required for decision makers to identify, promote and scale effective interventions. Yet [...]
Large regional variation in global impacts of agriculture on terrestrial insects and other arthropods
Published: 2025-11-26
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Many insects and other arthropods are reported to be in rapid decline worldwide, mainly driven by changes in land use and climate. At the same time, arthropods provide many important services that benefit agriculture, and thus their losses may pose risks to food security. Although biodiversity responses vary between global realms, this spatial heterogeneity is not well-understood and is rarely [...]
CartograPlant: Bridging genomic, phenotypic, and environmental data to advance plant resilience and eco-evolutionary insight
Published: 2025-09-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Pathology, Systems Biology
Climate change is threatening plant health and productivity at all spatial scales, and these impacts are further compounded by the rising incidence of invasive pests and pathogens. Effectively addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive understanding of plant demography as well as the mechanisms and drivers of adaptation. Achieving this understanding requires the integration of [...]
Alternative Promoters Expand Transcriptional Complexity of Temperature Stress Responses in Cassava
Published: 2025-09-29
Subjects: Agriculture, Bioinformatics, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Plant abiotic stress responses involve two major gene expression regulatory mechanisms: alternative promoter usage and differential expression. Although differentially expressed genes (DEGs) have been extensively studied, alternative promoter genes (APGs) remain poorly characterized despite their potential importance. We systematically compared APGs and DEGs in cassava (Manihot esculenta), a [...]