Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Research Methods in Life Sciences
Going Global by Going Local: Impacts and Opportunities of Geographically Focused Data Integration
Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Biodiversity conservation is a global challenge that requires the integration of global and local data. Expanding global data infrastructures have opened unprecedented opportunities for biodiversity data storage, curation, and dissemination. Within one such infrastructure – the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) – these benefits are achieved by aggregating data from over 100 regional [...]
Elevating the importance of Risk of Bias assessment for ecology and evolution
Published: 2025-06-17
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 [...]
Gendered male and high-income country authors dominate publication at a One Health research organization
Published: 2025-05-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Publishing, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Authorship on academic publications carries substantial weight for researchers in science fields. One’s position in a list of authors is typically used to signal information about author contributions and status, with the first and last authorship positions regarded as the most prestigious and important for career advancement. Therefore, any inequities that exist in the allocation of publication [...]
Deep-learning technology provides insights into the morphological evolution of birds
Published: 2025-04-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Computational Engineering, Evolution, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
The evolution of biological morphology is critical for understanding the diversity of the natural world, yet traditional analyses often involve subjective biases in the selection and coding of morphological traits. This study employs deep learning techniques, utilizing a pretrained ResNet34 model capable of recognizing over 10,000 bird species, to explore avian morphological evolution. We [...]
Assessment of Urban Bias in Iberian Butterfly Sampling through Citizen Science Data
Published: 2025-01-24
Subjects: Entomology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Citizen science platforms have revolutionized biodiversity monitoring by enabling large-scale data collection. However, concerns about potential biases, such as urban sampling bias, have raised questions about the quality and representativeness of these datasets. This study assesses the spatial distribution of butterfly observations collected through the citizen science platform Biodiversidad [...]
Effect of bulb type on moth trap catch and composition in UK gardens
Published: 2024-11-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Abstract 1. A wide variety of light sources are employed to trap moths, differing in brightness and spectrum. Relatively little is known about how these factors affect the resulting sample. 2. We analyse 7 moth trap bulb types using 10 years of records from the Garden Moth Scheme to provide the largest and most comprehensive comparison of moth trap bulb types to date. 3. 125W Mercury Vapour (MV) [...]
How can we make conferences more inclusive? Lessons from the International Ethological Congress
Published: 2024-09-25
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Despite growing awareness of the importance of researcher diversity, barriers to inclusion and equity persist in science and at academic conferences. As hosts of the 37th International Ethological Congress, “Behaviour 2023”, we studied equity, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) issues using observational and experimental behavioural data collected during question and answer (Q&A) sessions in [...]
Repeatability and intra-class correlations from time-to-event data: towards a standardized approach
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Many biological features are expressed as “time-to-event” traits, such as time to first reproduction or response to some stimulus. The analysis of these traits frequently produces right-censored data in cases where no event has occurred within a certain timeframe. The Cox proportional hazards (CPH) model, a type of survival analysis, accounts for censored data by estimating the hazard of an event [...]
Methods to identify silk gland activation patterns in spider spinning behaviours
Published: 2024-05-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Spiders possess multiple types of silk glands, producing silk materials with contrasting properties, and which are deployed in distinct behavioural contexts, such as locomotion, prey capture and egg casing. Whereas the diversity of silk glands and spigots across different spider families is relatively well described, their biological functions (i.e., with which behaviour each gland type is [...]
Navigating phylogenetic conflict and evolutionary inference in plants with target capture data
Published: 2024-05-28
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Target capture has quickly become a preferred approach for plant systematic and evolutionary research, marking a step-change in the generation of data for phylogenetic inference. While this advancement has facilitated the resolution of many relationships, phylogenetic conflict continues to be reported, and often attributed to genome duplication, reticulation, incomplete lineage sorting or rapid [...]
Global review of shorebird tracking publications: Gaps and priorities for research and conservation
Published: 2024-05-08
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Electronic tracking has enabled rapid advances in knowledge of the movement behaviour and habitat use of shorebirds (Charadriiformes), and is thus making a growing contribution to their conservation. However, developing a useful coherent global strategy for tracking these taxa requires an overview of the current availability of data and how it varies along regional and ecological lines. To this [...]
Historic residential segregation impacts biodiversity data availability disparately across the tree of life
Published: 2024-04-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Race and Ethnicity, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Urbanization alters species ranges and nature’s contributions to people, motivating urban conservation. Residential segregation policies have left an indelible impact on urban environments, greenspaces, and wildlife communities, creating socioeconomic heterogeneity and altering biota. However, the extent to which data sufficiently capture urban biodiversity patterns remains unclear, especially [...]
Quantifying taxon-specific habitat connectivity requirements of urban wildlife using structured expert judgement
Published: 2024-02-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Urban planning which enhances native biodiversity in and around cities is needed to address the impacts of urbanisation and conserve urban biodiversity. The “Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design” (BSUD) framework incorporates ecological knowledge into urban planning to achieve positive biodiversity outcomes through improved urban design and infrastructure development. BSUD includes principles to [...]
Quantifying clearance rates of restored shellfish reefs using modular baskets
Published: 2023-12-08
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management, Zoology
Shellfish reefs are among the most degraded ecosystems globally, prompting substantial efforts to restore them. While biodiversity gains of restored reefs are well documented, other ecosystem services such as water filtration remain poorly quantified. We present a novel way of measuring water filtration by restored reefs using modular restoration structures called Robust Oyster Baskets (ROB 400). [...]
Covariance reaction norms: A flexible method for estimating complex environmental effects on trait (co)variances
Published: 2023-11-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology
Estimating quantitative genetic and phenotypic (co)variances is crucial for investigating evolutionary ecological phenomena such as developmental integration, life history tradeoffs, and niche specialization, as well as for describing selection and predicting multivariate evolution in the wild. While most studies assume (co)variances are fixed over short timescales, environmental heterogeneity [...]