Preprints
There are 3246 Preprints listed.
Reframing the habitat fragmentation debate around the inferential targets predicted by ecological theory
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
The habitat fragmentation debate has persisted for more than three decades because dominant empirical practice has often estimated a narrower quantity than the competing ecological theories jointly require. These frameworks differ not simply in whether fragmentation matters, but in how their predicted effects change along the habitat-amount gradient. The habitat amount hypothesis (HAH) predicts [...]
Centering human cognition in epidemiological models
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Epidemiological models (EMs) have traditionally treated human behavior as static or as a simple function of disease prevalence, limiting their ability to capture disease trajectories such as those observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that infectious disease is fundamentally a coupled human-pathogen system in which cognition and behavior operate on different timescales and must be [...]
Removal and decomposition of fruit respond in opposite ways to canopy cover in a biodiversity experiment
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Trees often produce more fruits than frugivores consume. As a result, many fruits fall to the ground, where they are either secondarily removed by vertebrates, potentially leading to seed dispersal, or they are decomposed by arthropods. Although often neglected, fallen fruits are an important component of forests and contribute to their functioning via these two distinct pathways. While fruit [...]
The Global Biodiversity Framework supports global assessment of One Health actions
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences, Public Health
The One Health approach promotes collaboration across disciplines to enhance the health of humans, animals, plants, and the environment. Recently developed by the Quadripartite organizations, the One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022-2026) supports countries in adopting the One Health approach through six action tracks. The tracks address multiple aspects of biodiversity, containing guiding [...]
Making use of oak genomes
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Genomics, Life Sciences
This review summarizes the contributions of genomics to our understanding of oak evolution and management, both past and ongoing. Far from being exhaustive given the large number of publications following the publication of the genomes, this review emphasizes work conducted in the decade following publication of the first two complete oak genome assemblies, and major findings and achievements [...]
Nature finance: we need (some) offsets
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies
Nature offsets – mechanisms that allow for negative environmental impacts (e.g. biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions) to be fully compensated for and neutralized – are extremely widespread, but have become increasingly controversial, to the extent they are now starting to be precluded from new environmental policy developments. In turn, leaders are becoming more reticent about their [...]
The bacterial immune system: identifying evolved defense adaptations
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Microbiology
The last few years have witnessed a rapid expansion of reported bacterial defense mechanisms. Alongside established mechanisms of defense against molecular parasites (e.g. CRISPR-Cas, restriction-modification), hundreds of novel defenses are being described each year, contributing to an ever-expanding ‘bacterial immune system’. Terms like ‘defense’ and ‘immune’ are often used as shorthand for an [...]
Harnessing hidden synergies in conservation planning: do “umbrella action plans” reduce redundancy and improve efficiency?
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity
Conservation Action Plans (APs) are widely used to guide biodiversity interventions, but they are often developed in isolation, leading to redundancy and poorly coordinated implementation. We assess whether identifying thematic overlap among APs can reveal practical opportunities for coordination, and introduce the concept of Umbrella Action Plans (UAPs) as a framework to streamline conservation [...]
HARBOUR PORPOISE RESPONSES TO PILE DRIVING ARE BETTER PREDICTED BY DISTANCE TO SOURCE THAN BY ENERGY-BASED RECEIVED SOUND LEVELS
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Regulatory assessments for offshore construction are required to avoid impacts on protected marine mammals through noise-related injury or disturbance. Criteria for injury risk are widely accepted, but the extent to which behavioural responses are related to noise levels or co-varying contextual factors such as proximity remains uncertain. 2. This study used arrays of echolocation detectors [...]
A Game-Theoretic and Dynamical-Systems Framework for Anti-Poaching Resource Allocation: A Case Study of Etosha National Park
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology
Wildlife poaching threatens biodiversity across sub-Saharan Africa, and is especially acute for critically endangered species such as the black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis). Etosha National Park, Namibia (22,935 km²), is patrolled by approximately 295 anti-poaching rangers—fewer than 0.02 per km²—posing two interlinked operational questions: where should a limited workforce be placed to maximise [...]
Livestock subsidise tiger diets in a central Indian corridor: implications for human-wildlife conflict management and conservation planning
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Large carnivores, like tigers, maintain a balance within their respective ecosystem and play a critical role. However, due to their life history needs and extensive overlap with humans, they face significant threats across their distribution. These threats become severe when they inhabit non-protected areas like corridors and kill livestock. In this study, the food habits of tiger were assessed [...]
An epibiotic association between burrowing and sessile bivalves on the Amazon continental shelf: implications for ecological facilitation in sediment-dominated environments
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
From the perspective of ecological facilitation theory, we report an epibiotic association between two mollusk species with contrasting lifestyles, Chama macerophylla Gmelin, 1791 (sessile) and Tucetona pectinata (Gmelin, 1791) (burrowing), on the Amazon continental margin. Specimens were collected using a Van Veen dredge near the shelf break and in the vicinity of AP3 blocks recently offered for [...]
OdoCocktail-Japan: Primer sets to enrich environmental DNA of Japanese Odonata species
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Monitoring is essential to conserve and recover biodiversity. Environmental DNA (eDNA)-based metabarcoding analysis has been recognized as a cost-effective and efficient method to monitor species, but it still has limitations, such as insufficient reference databases and lack of primer sets suitable to detect target species. As biological indicators of freshwater habitats, Odonata species have [...]
Cold treatment benefits Mediterranean orchid seedlings cultivated in vitro
Published: 2026-05-11
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
1. Effective ex situ propagation is increasingly critical for the conservation and restoration of terrestrial orchids threatened by habitat loss, over-collection and climate change. However, large-scale propagation remains constrained by developmental bottlenecks during the transition from protocorms to established plantlets with storage organs. Cold exposure is often recommended to improve [...]
Hybridization in Animal Evolution
Published: 2026-05-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In the past two decades, it has become clear that hybridization is so common in animal species as to be an almost universal feature of their evolutionary histories. Remnants of both ancient and contemporary hybridization events are present in the genomes of modern species, but their consequences are still not completely understood. In this review, we synthesize what is known about the [...]