Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Marine Biology
Temperature carryover effect revealed for marine fishes using spatio-temporal distributed lag models
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Marine Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Understanding the impact of changing temperature on population densities is necessary to predict the likely impact of climate anomalies (e.g., marine heatwaves) or forecast distribution shifts under future climate scenarios. Population densities are often analyzed using spatio-temporal models (STMs), which typically predict densities based on local habitat conditions while also estimating latent [...]
Ecological examples of nonstationarity, nonlinearity, and statistical interactions in dynamic structural equation models
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecologists are adapting structural causal modelling for spatial, phylogenetic, and time-series analysis. However, ecological extensions of path analysis and structural equation models (SEM) typically assume that interactions (“path coefficients”) are stationary, linear, and additive, while ecological and evolutionary dynamics are often nonstationary, nonlinear, and include statistical [...]
Marine biodiversity indicators and online data knowledge systems
Published: 2026-01-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Marine Biology
Coastal marine ecosystems and biodiversity are changing rapidly under climate forcing, resource use, pollution and habitat modification. Monitoring these changes, and tracking progress across policy targets, remain constrained by uneven data coverage, fragmented observing networks and inconsistent measurement practices. International policy frameworks, most prominently the Kunming-Montreal Global [...]
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 [...]
Social structure in northern bottlenose whales: Stable relationships without stable groups
Published: 2025-12-22
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Uncovering the drivers and function(s) of social relationships across a wide range of species is key to understanding the ecology and evolution of social behaviour. Northern bottlenose whales have been identified as a particularly important case study for social evolution. Unlike other large, toothed whale species which live in kin-based social units, northern bottlenose whales appear to form [...]
Operationalising resilience-based management at scale: a meta-adaptive blueprint from the Great Barrier Reef Crown-of-Thorns Starfish Control Program
Published: 2025-12-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Resilience-based management (RBM) has been widely adopted as a future focused extension of adaptive management to address mounting climate change impacts on coral reef ecosystems, yet there are few demonstrated examples of RBM operating effectively at large spatial and institutional scales. The Crown-of-Thorns Starfish (COTS) Control Program on the Great Barrier Reef illustrates how RBM can be [...]
Coevolution of social network structure and life history in toothed whales
Published: 2025-12-18
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Marine Biology
Toothed whales offer a 34 million year-long natural experiment for the evolution of complex mammalian societies. However, quantitative comparative analyses of social structure in these species are lacking. Here, we draw on existing social network analyses to compare social structure across toothed whales. We consider published measures of two social network traits across all toothed whales: [...]
From Business Intelligence to Conservation Intelligence: Operationalising adaptive pest control to protect the resilience of the Great Barrier Reef
Published: 2025-12-15
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Resilience-Based Management (RBM) is crucial for enhancing outcomes in conservation interventions as the climate changes. To be effective it requires continuous modelling, assessment, evaluation and adjustment. Here, we adapt established Business Intelligence software into Conservation Intelligence tools to provide the near real-time analytics and a decision support system necessary for effective [...]
R for marine ecologists: wrangling Earth System Model outputs
Published: 2025-12-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
This one-day, hands-on workshop introduces marine ecologists to the use and application of Earth System Model (ESM) outputs using R–a free, open-source programming language widely used in marine ecology. Designed for participants with basic or no prior experience in climate modeling, our workshop: 'R for marine ecologists: wrangling Earth System Model outputs' provides a comprehensive foundation [...]
Life-history-specific thresholds for the Fishing Mortality Index: validation on 209 stocks
Published: 2025-12-09
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
The exploitation fraction E = F/(F+M) has served as a standard metric for assessing fishing pressure since Gulland (1971), with E = 0.5 widely adopted as a precautionary threshold. However, E compresses the relationship between fishing mortality (F) and natural mortality (M) into a single dimension, obscuring magnitude differences across life histories. We introduce the Fishing Mortality Index [...]
What evidence exists on the effectiveness of nature-inclusive designs for marine biodiversity in offshore wind farms? A Systematic map protocol
Published: 2025-11-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
The global expansion of offshore wind energy is essential for meeting climate targets, yet its ecological impacts on marine biodiversity remain a major concern. In line with the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls upon all economic sectors to reduce negative impacts and enhance positive contributions, Nature-inclusive Designs (NiDs) have been proposed to reduce the [...]
Response to “Radiolarian evolution: Analytical challenges in estimating the diversity and origin of Nature’s stars”
Published: 2025-11-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Genetics and Genomics, Marine Biology
We appreciate Daniel Lahr’s concern (Lahr, 2025) on the interpretation and conclusions of our study “Extant diversity, biogeography, and evolutionary history of Radiolaria” (Sandin et al., 2025). Given that some of these comments were already addressed in our original study following reviewers comments and that such issues are well known in the molecular diversity and evolution fields we [...]
GhostNetZero: AI for Detecting Marine Ghost Nets
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Marine Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Sustainability
Abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gears (ALDFG), commonly referred to as ghost nets, pose a persistent global threat to marine biodiversity. Constructed from durable synthetic polymers, ghost nets remain intact for decades, continuing to entangle and kill marine organisms while damaging habitats and imposing economic burdens on fisheries and coastal communities. Despite their [...]
Movement-informed projections of Bristol Bay red king crab seasonal distribution to support spatial management decisions
Published: 2025-09-22
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Understanding seasonal shifts in the spatial distribution of Bristol Bay red king crab (BBRKC) is essential to developing adaptive management strategies that promote sustainable harvest. Although fishery harvests suggest a substantial shift in the distribution of male crab between late spring (when fishery-independent bottom trawl surveys occur) and autumn (during the directed fishery), the [...]
Trophic Reorganization and Energy Deficit: A Multispecies Size-Spectrum Model of the Grand Banks
Published: 2025-09-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Marine ecosystems face unprecedented pressures from fishing and climate change, with both bottom-up energy transfer and top-down predation influencing ecosystem control, though their relative importance varies across space and time. The Grand Banks of Newfoundland provides a compelling case study, where capelin (Mallotus villosus) biomass collapsed by 99% in 1990–1991, followed by the collapse of [...]