Preprints
There are 3374 Preprints listed.
In-silico evaluation of aspartate therapy for lactic acidosis in Alligator mississippiensis
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Computational Biology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences
Hyperlactatemia, and/or lactic acidosis, is a common complication in wildlife due to the sensitivity of these species to capture induce complications. The treatment of lactic acidosis in humans is equally as controversial as in veterinary medicine. Stabilisation of blood pH during lactic acidosis is difficult to achieve. Crocodilians, such as the American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), [...]
Structural and functional skin microbiota on cane toads across 16,000 km of invaded range
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Host-associated microbial communities are shaped by environmental availability, host filtering, microbial interactions, and prior pathogen exposure, with connected habitats promoting greater adaptive microbiome potential. Across the invasive range of cane toads, containing expansive disconnects between populations, we found strong spatial variation in skin bacterial communities, including among [...]
The Fish Fauna of Tubbataha Reefs is highly Biodiverse and distinctively Oceanic
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Zoology
We surveyed the fish fauna of Tubbataha Reefs, a remote and well-protected coral reef system in the Philippines. Tubbataha is located in the Coral Triangle, the region with the highest marine biodiversity in the world, and is a no-take marine protected area. We found a total of 534 species, with the Labridae (65 species), Pomacentridae (60 species), Gobiidae (60 species), Chaetodonidae (33 [...]
Visual-chemotactic saltatory search in Octopus hummelincki (Mollusca, Cephalopoda): a case study in the South Atlantic
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
We report for the first time evidence of foraging by Octopus hummelincki and analyze it using saltatory search theory, which posits alternating phases of locomotion and stationary search. Our data showed that substrate complexity dictates behavioral transitions: locomotion predominated in sand, whereas solid substrates elicited tactile exploration. The move-to-search scaling ratio (0.63) aligns [...]
robust.prioritizr: Robust Systematic Conservation Prioritization
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Climate change poses significant threats to biodiversity. To ensure the long-term persistence of species, protected areas must be established in locations that will safeguard suitable habitats in the future. Although statistical models can predict where such habitats may occur under different future scenarios, designing protected areas that can effectively protect these habitats across a wide [...]
Body condition, but not reproductive success, is associated with sociality in a colonial seabird.
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Ornithology, Zoology
Body condition, breeding habitat quality and access to socially acquired information are generally associated with higher fitness in social animals. In colonial species that breed in dense aggregations, such as seabirds, the combined effects of these factors on reproductive success have rarely been tested together. In this study, we investigated the relationship between fledging success, body [...]
Governing for Learning: Institutional Foundations of Effective Adaptive Management
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Adaptive management (AM) remains one of the most promising frameworks for managing conservation challenges under uncertainty, yet its potential is rarely realized in practice. Conservation agencies routinely make repeated decisions under uncertainty, but those decisions are often not structured in ways that allow learning to accumulate and improve future choices. This Perspectives article argues [...]
Algorithmically-controlled ecosystems and biodiversity
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Algorithmically-controlled ecosystems are ecosystems in which at least one key process rate or property (e.g. biodiversity) is under control by algorithms, or if ecosystems contain robots/ machines. Algorithmic influence on ecosystems will be matter of degree, and we highlight the risks and opportunities of such algorithm-influenced ecosystems, as well as the need to have discussions about [...]
From Footprints to Handprints: Principles for Assessing an Organisation’s Positive Impacts on Biodiversity
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Biodiversity
Organisations are increasingly acknowledging their responsibility to ‘bend the curve of biodiversity loss’ by reducing negative biodiversity impacts, often referred to as biodiversity footprints. A growing number of organisations are also interested in highlighting the positive impacts they have on biodiversity, driven by research, innovation and lobbying, for example. Limited guidance currently [...]
A mathematical foundation of modelling thermal injury and repair dynamics in ectotherms
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Evolution, Life Sciences, Physiology, Plant Sciences, Population Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Survival Analysis
As global temperatures rise and extreme heat events impair ectotherm performance and survival, it is becoming increasingly important to predict how organisms accumulate and repair thermal injury under realistic benign and stressful temperatures. The thermal death time (TDT) model quantifies how heat events translate into thermal injury, but under natural temperature fluctuations the TDT model is [...]
When does modelling dependence change the target of biodiversity indicators?
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Biodiversity
Recent biodiversity trend analyses have modelled uncertainty arising from temporal, spatial and phylogenetic dependence. For descriptive indicators such as the Living Planet Index (LPI) however, a prior question is whether dependence modelling improves estimation of a fixed quantity or risks changing the quantity being reported. Using the high-profile case of Johnson et al. (2024), the current [...]
Neural dynamic N-mixture model: a deep learning framework to infer demographic rates from count data
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Population Biology
Changes in population abundance arise from underlying demographic processes, namely survival and recruitment, and knowledge of these two vital rates is crucial for better understanding biodiversity changes. Although demographic data based on individual encounter histories are often sparse in space and time, the dynamic N-mixture model provides an alternative by inferring survival and recruitment [...]
What Artificial Intelligence Cannot Replace in Ecology?
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly integrated into ecological research, from literature synthesis and hypothesis generation to statistical modelling and data analysis. As AI systems become more autonomous, discussions about ecology's future are often framed as a competition between human and machine intelligence. Yet this perspective overlooks a more fundamental question: what [...]
EarthChirp: a global reference library for insect acoustic recognition and discovery across the audible and ultrasonic spectrum
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Genetics and Genomics
1. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is scaling rapidly, but automated recognition for insects lags far behind birds. The dominant recogniser (BirdNET) classifies only ~35 insect species and building bespoke insect classifiers requires labelled training data that does not exist for most taxa. 2. We present EarthChirp, a training-free recogniser for singing insects (Orthoptera and Cicadidae) [...]
Mind the Gap: A critical 40-fold workforce shortfall for protecting 30% of the ocean
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Public Economics
Despite being tasked with protecting ocean biodiversity, the marine protected area (MPA) workforce remains poorly described. Using a global site-level questionnaire, we assessed staffing, workforce adequacy, technology use, and personnel requirements for effectively and equitably conserving 30% of the ocean by 2030 (30 x 30). Responses represented 52.8% of global MPA area across 63 countries and [...]