Preprints
There are 2828 Preprints listed.
Building bridges between ecological and economic agent-based models of agriculture
Published: 2025-09-26
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies
Agriculture is a complex social-ecological system with numerous interactions and feedbacks between policies, markets, farm management, landscapes, and ecosystems. Because of these interconnections, policy changes, societal trends, and environmental crises can have widespread knock-on effects that threaten the stability of the entire system. Agent-based models have become a valuable tool used for [...]
Jaguars Attacks on Humans in the Brazilian Amazon
Published: 2025-09-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Attacks on humans by large carnivores are well documented globally, yet jaguar (Panthera onca) attacks are widely considered rare. We reassessed this assumption by compiling all known records of jaguar attacks on humans in the Brazilian Amazon between 1950 and 2025. A total of 84 cases were identified through a combination of field documentation, local news sources and scientific literature. The [...]
ECOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS AND PREDATION DYNAMICS BETWEEN JAGUARS AND ARAGUAIA RIVER DOLPHINS
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Araguaia River dolphin (Inia araguaiaensis), classified as Vulnerable, faces threats from conflict with fisheries, habitat loss and fragmentation, pollution, and declining fish stocks. Although jaguars (Panthera onca) are known to hunt aquatic prey, predation on freshwater dolphins has been rarely documented. This study reports two confirmed cases of jaguars preying on I. araguaiaensis in the [...]
Bridging Knowledge Systems to Guide Natural Resource Decision-Making
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
International agreements call for inclusion of Indigenous and local knowledge in resource management, yet practical approaches remain underdeveloped. We argue that knowledge co-assessment offers a feasible pathway. Drawing on examples from practice in the Arctic, we provide guidance for equitable engagement, communication, and scaling, ensuring legitimacy, inclusivity, and actionable governance.
Feasibility of heart rate variability analysis for welfare assessment in dolphins: a preliminary report
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Monitoring stress and emotional states in dolphins is an important step toward improving animal welfare in managed care. Established physiological approaches, such as measuring cortisol from blood or fecal samples, have provided valuable information for stress assessment. Suction-based devices have also enabled cardiac monitoring, contributing to our understanding of diving physiology and [...]
The past, present and future of online biodiversity knowledge systems
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
In recent decades, there has been an exponential increase in the availability and accessibility of biodiversity data and a profusion of portals, tools, and platforms through which to utilise it. This reflects the extensive variety of challenges biodiversity data is being used to address and the need to enhance decision-making by different stakeholder groups. Whilst this has provided unprecedented [...]
Nine changes needed to deliver a radical transformation in biodiversity measurement
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biodiversity is declining in many parts of the world. Biological diversity measurement and monitoring are fundamental to the assessment of the causes and consequences of environmental changes, identification of key areas for the protection of biodiversity or ecosystem services, determining the effectiveness of actions, and the creation of decision-support tools critical to maintaining a [...]
The Invisible Majority: Disciplinary Bias and the Systematic Neglect of Real Biodiversity
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Taxonomy underpins all biodiversity sciences, yet its essential role in measuring and managing life on Earth remains underrecognized in conservation and policy frameworks. Analyzing 360 articles from 12 leading ecology and taxonomy journals in 2024, we reveal that ecologists overwhelmingly focus on historically familiar vertebrates, while taxonomists emphasize recently described invertebrates—the [...]
Species Invasion in a Two-Dimensional Space with Irregularly Shaped Patches
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Accounting for spatial heterogeneity in the evolution of a species population in a given space is of much importance in population ecology, epidemiology and related fields in biosciences. Past literature has presented such analysis in the presence of regions with distinct diffusion/growth properties, often referred to as patches. However, most of the past work is limited to one-dimensional space, [...]
Classification and regression trees clarify the role of epistasis and environment in genotype–phenotype maps
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how genetic variation translates into phenotypic outcomes is central to various sub-fields of genetics. This task is complicated by a range of forces–including epistasis, environmental modulation of mutation effects, and ecological influences–that complicate the process of mapping from genotype to phenotype. In this study, we apply a unified decision tree approach, classification [...]
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 [...]
Spatial networks of habitats, populations, and communities: connecting approaches to keep cutting edges
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Purpose of review: Spatial networks are extensively used in ecology to represent exchanges among landscape features (e.g., habitat patches, river segments) or biological entities (e.g., individuals, populations, communities). I reviewed the literature produced in the past 25 years using these networks. Distinct types of spatial networks have emerged in several subfields of ecology. I aimed to [...]
Social implications of human food subsidies on wildlife populations
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Human activities—intentionally or not—generate a variety of novel food sources that wild animals exploit. On land and in water, human food sources can profoundly alter intraspecific interactions with cascading effects on population dynamics and ecosystem functioning. Yet, despite their growing ecological relevance, the role of human food subsidies in shaping intraspecific interactions remains [...]
A high-resolution physiological timeseries uncovers strong but variable seasonal acclimation of thermal limits in a copepod community
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
How a community responds to warming depends on both intra-specific variation in thermal limits and variation in acclimation capacity across community members. These factors, however, are often overlooked, leading to uncertainties about how climate change affects biodiversity. In temperate regions, communities are exposed to large seasonal temperature fluctuations, providing an opportunity to [...]
Novel worker-like behaviour observed in gynes of the social parasite Tetramorium microgyna
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Socially parasitic ants increase their own fitness by exploiting the labour and resources of non-kin ant colonies. Here, we report a novel worker-like behaviour observed in an African workerless inquiline, Tetramorium microgyna, a parasite of Tetramorium sericeiventre. We observed several T. microgyna gynes excavating soil and performing nest maintenance tasks at the entrance of an established T. [...]