Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Education
Reimagining Training for the Next Generation of Ecologists
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
Rampant environmental degradation and biodiversity loss underscore an urgent need for ecological knowledge that can directly help address social‑environmental challenges. We argue that improved Earth stewardship needs ecologists to integrate foundational ecological knowledge to contextual understanding, relational practices, and engagement with decision‑making when proposing effective solutions. [...]
Towards a standard model for teaching the process of biological evolution
Published: 2026-05-25
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
Evolution is widely considered to be one of the cornerstones of the biological sciences. Despite this importance, the process of biological evolution remains widely misunderstood among students, illustrating that evolution education is in need of an educational synthesis. The current paradigm for teaching the evolutionary process revolves around using population genetics models to illustrate the [...]
Expanding the uptake of conservation technology: insights from efforts to share conservation bioacoustics capacity in Indonesia and Malaysia
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) of terrestrial habitats has grown exponentially over the last three decades, given recent technological advances and the utility of this approach in providing information on acoustically active animals, their habitats, and human activities across large spatial and temporal scales. Yet, just 1% of PAM studies were conducted in Southeast Asia, despite the region’s [...]
FGMLab: An open-source software for teaching biological evolution through Fisher's geometric model
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Education
The process of biological evolution is typically taught through the lens of population genetics, where students are presented with models and diagrams of how alleles (genetic variants) change in frequency over time. While this convention depicts the underlying genetic basis of biological evolution, it fails to quantitatively illustrate how traits, on which natural selection actually acts, evolve. [...]
Replicards: Teaching and simulating evolution with a card-based experiment
Published: 2026-03-31
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
The teaching of biological evolution in high schools is often reduced to an account of the history of evolutionary thought. As a result, students assimilate evolutionism more as a philosophical current of thought led by distinguished thinkers than as a fruitful area of scientific research. Often, mere verbal exposition is not enough for students to truly understand evolutionary phenomena, such as [...]
Seven principles for engaging schools with nature: pooling the expertise of teachers and nature educators
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Education, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations
Nature connection in schools can address several issues faced in both environmental and educational fields. However, guidance is limited and many aspects can feel daunting or risky for schools under multiple other constraints. As a group of researchers, schoolteachers, and nature educators, we have co-produced seven guiding principles for integrating nature within UK schooling, particularly in [...]
BPGA: an interactive Shiny application for basic population genetic analysis of genotype data
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Education, Genetics and Genomics, Higher Education, Life Sciences
Background: Population structure and ancestry inference are routine in human genetics, yet remain inconvenient for non-experts because canonical tools (PLINK, GCTA, ADMIXTURE) require command-line expertise and careful data management. Results: BPGA (Basic Population Genetic Analysis) is an open‑source R/Shiny application that provides an interactive workflow for educational and exploratory [...]
Dragon Kill Points: applying a transparent working template to relieve authorship stress
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Education, Engineering, Law, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The concept of authorship, while straightforward in theory, proves to be remarkably complex in practice. While existing frameworks provide a foundation for classifying and ranking authorship roles, conflicts still arise when contributions are ambiguous or poorly documented. To address these issues, we propose Dragon Kill Points, adapted from multiplayer gaming, which tracks individual [...]
Strategies to transform natural resource extension with iNaturalist and engage the public in biodiversity conservation
Published: 2025-01-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Education, Life Sciences
Participatory citizen science is an increasingly popular tool which provides non-formal education and learning activities. iNaturalist—a free open-access—participatory citizen science platform provides a place to engage the public in natural resource programming. Here, we explore practical applications for integrating iNaturalist into extension programming. We highlight two approaches: (1) [...]
One Earth + One Health: An Agile, Evolutionary, System-of-Systems, Convergence Paradigm
Published: 2024-12-06
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Evolutionary mechanisms have enabled humans to transform Earth systems. Because the resulting Anthropocene systems are highly interdependent and dynamically evolving, often with accelerating rates of cultural and technological evolution, One Earth and One Health must be framed and addressed in a holistic fashion. An agile, evolutionary, system-of-systems, convergence paradigm, which is based on [...]
Prokaryotes Become Larger at High Temperatures but They Do Not Grow Faster
Published: 2024-11-14
Subjects: Education
Metabolic theory posits that metabolism governs the rate at which organisms transform energy into biological work and growth. Thus, it constitutes the main mechanism driving the evolution of organismal growth and size across almost all domains of life. One general prediction of metabolic theory suggests that populations of larger organisms grow more slowly than populations of smaller organisms. [...]
O mapa do tesouro perdido: guias de campo e o seu papel na promoção da conservação
Published: 2024-05-01
Subjects: Education
O projeto ‘Guias da Conservação: de turista a naturalista’ surgiu com o propósito de estimular o pensamento conservacionista através da sensibilização do público, utilizando-se da biodiversidade contida na Mata Atlântica na forma de guias de campo. Este trabalho teve como objetivo avaliar a recepção dos guias de campo desenvolvidos pelo projeto. O público alvo foi o público participante do evento [...]
Harnessing open science practices to teach ecology and evolution using interactive tutorials
Published: 2023-08-31
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
Open science skills are increasingly important for a career in ecology and evolution as efforts to make data and analyses publicly available and transparent continue to become more commonplace. However, open science skills are not typically taught in biology undergraduate programs. In learning core concepts in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), students must also gain skills in open [...]
Imagining Kant’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge: Philosophy and Education in Microbiology
Published: 2022-12-10
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
In the field of observational and experimental natural sciences (as is the case for microbiology), recent decades have been overinfluenced by overwhelming technological advances, and the space of abstraction has been frequently disdained. However, the predictable future of biological sciences should necessarily recover the synthetic dimension of “natural philosophy”. We should understand the [...]
Towards a new stable state: Equitably assessing trainee writing productivity post-COVID-19
Published: 2022-08-30
Subjects: Disability and Equity in Education, Education, Gender Equity in Education, Higher Education
The current academic ‘ecosystem’ prioritizes publications and has remained in this stable state despite increasing calls for change. Although writing is a strong determinant of academic success, certain groups may experience publishing barriers that may be amplified by disruptive events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we surveyed 342 graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to assess (1) how [...]