Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Agriculture
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: 2026-01-23
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: 2025-11-27
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 [...]
Building bridges between ecological and economic agent-based models of agriculture
Published: 2025-09-26
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies
Agriculture is a complex social-ecological system with numerous interactions and feedbacks between policies, markets, farm management, landscapes, and ecosystems. Because of these interconnections, policy changes, societal trends, and environmental crises can have widespread knock-on effects that threaten the stability of the entire system. Agent-based models have become a valuable tool used for [...]
Persefone.jl: Modelling Biodiversity in Dynamic Agricultural Landscapes
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Agriculture, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Population Biology
Agricultural landscapes are highly dynamic, constantly changing in space and time due to the effects of farm management and environmental factors. To forecast the effects of changes in agricultural systems on biodiversity, we need to understand these landscape dynamics and how they impact different species. Here, we present Persefone.jl, an open-source process-based model of agricultural [...]
Predictive Evolutionary Genomics: Principles, Validation, and Practice
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Population Biology
Contemporary evolution occurs on observable timescales, enabling prospective evolutionary forecasting with quantitative frameworks rather than only retrospective inference. We propose a unified probabilistic framework that integrates three approaches linked to detectability windows through time. Trait-based models use multivariate quantitative-genetic equations to project correlated phenotypic [...]
Illegal cattle trade drives New World Screwworm emergence in wildlife and erodes Mesoamerica’s Protected Areas
Published: 2025-07-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Diseases, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Parasitic Diseases, Parasitology, Public Health, Veterinary Preventive Medicine, Epidemiology, and Public Health
The New World Screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax; “screwworm”) is a parasitic fly historically endemic to the Americas. Females lay eggs in open wounds of warm-blooded animals, including humans. The emerging larvae feed on the host’s living tissue, often resulting in severe damage and potentially death. After five decades of coordinated efforts, the screwworm was successfully eradicated from [...]
Cover crops influence aboveground and belowground invertebrates in farmlands
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1. Maintaining vegetation diversity through cover crops could counteract the decreasing soil carbon and biodiversity in intensive monoculture farming, but its impacts on fauna have rarely been quantified. 2. To investigate how cover crops influence the abundance and trophic structure of invertebrates, or inorganic N (proxy of soil functioning), barley (Hordeum vulgare) was grown with up to eight [...]
Elevating the importance of Risk of Bias assessment for ecology and evolution
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are key evidence synthesis methods informing research and policy. An assessment of the Risk of Bias (RoB) in included studies is normally considered an essential component of these. However, RoB assessment is rare in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), and tools from other fields are seldom adopted. To identify reasons for this limited uptake, we surveyed [...]