Preprints
There are 2942 Preprints listed.
The potential for passive acoustic monitoring and automated detection to improve conservation efforts of tarsiers in Sulawesi, Indonesia
Published: 2026-02-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Tarsiers are small, haplorrhine primates that occur in Southeast Asia. Tarsiers on the island of Sulawesi range from Vulnerable to Critically Endangered, and many are data deficient, which means there is a great need for improved monitoring approaches. Sulawesi tarsiers are pair-living, territorial, and engage in duets within human hearing range, which makes them ideal candidates for passive [...]
Insect Pests on the Move: Climate, Soil, Land Use, and the Search for Contingent Generality
Published: 2026-02-09
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Climate change is reshaping the geographic distributions of insect pests, with major consequences for agriculture, forestry, and ecosystem stability. Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used to project these changes, yet most rely primarily on climatic predictors and implicitly assume a degree of generality in species responses that may not hold across diverse taxa. Here, we evaluate [...]
Policy-Driven Forest Recovery in a Crisis-Affected Landscape: A Remote Sensing Study in the Rohingya Refugee Region of Bangladesh
Published: 2026-02-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Human displacement crises often place sudden pressure on forested environments where shelter materials and cooking fuel are sourced directly from nearby natural resources. Since 2017, the Rohingya refugee influx into Ukhiya and Teknaf sub-districts (Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh) has exerted intense pressure on surrounding forests through rapid settlement expansion and fuelwood extraction. In response, [...]
Evolutionary diversification of ecological specialists under informed resource choice
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Behavior can be an important modulator of eco-evolutionary dynamics and genetic evolution that is not always taken into account in models of evolutionary diversification. On the one hand, classical models for the evolution of ecological specialization have been extended to account for flexible behavioral aspects such as diet choice or matching habitat choice, but only in a subset of all spatial [...]
Biodiversity footprint of public procurement in Finland
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Halting biodiversity loss requires systematic action from all sectors of society. The public sector is a significant actor globally in creating markets for goods and services, public procurement representing on average 13 – 20% of national gross domestic product. In this study, we assessed the biodiversity footprint of public procurement in Finland for years 2021 and 2022. We applied the [...]
Diversity in a fuzzy world: a review of models and measures
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Biological diversity metrics have evolved from simple species counts to measures that incorporate increasingly complex functional information. A critical aspect is that different families of diversity indices are grounded in distinct mathematical models for representing uncertainty, including classical set theory, probability theory, and fuzzy set theory, which shape what these measures can [...]
The origins and diversification of hummingbird pollination in Bromeliaceae
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Plant Sciences
Bromeliaceae are a model group for understanding explosive Neotropical diversification, combining remarkable ecological breadth and high species richness, despite relatively recent evolutionary origins. Multiple drivers are hypothesised to accelerate bromeliad diversification, and hummingbird pollination is frequently proposed to be among the strongest. However, our understanding has been limited [...]
Passive acoustic monitoring outperforms observer-based methods for Australian frog communities
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Effective biodiversity monitoring is fundamental for evaluating conservation status and detecting population declines, yet traditional observer-based monitoring (OBM) is often constrained by high costs and logistical challenges resulting in limited spatial and temporal coverage. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) offers a scalable alternative, but its efficacy for frog biodiversity assessments [...]
Environmental gradients shape community composition, energy pathways, and trophic dynamics in a coastal Arctic food web
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
A central question in ecology is how environmental heterogeneity structures community composition and trophic organization, and whether changes in physical conditions alter energy pathways without changing overall network connectivity. Arctic food webs have generally been quantified at broader spatial scales which must average spatial heterogeneity, limiting the ability to quantify asymmetric [...]
One Toolbox, Many Tools: A Practitioner’s Guide to Latent Variable Modelling for Community Ecology
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Multivariate Analysis, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
In this article, we present the case for Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models (GLLVMs) as a go-to choice of statistical method for any community ecologist wanting to tackle a range of present-day ecological research questions. GLLVMs bring tools and capabilities from classic (mixed-effects) regression models to multivariate community analysis, providing a number of novel ways to tailor [...]
Critical methodological flaws in Feurer et al. (2025) render its findings untrustworthy
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
A recent article by Feurer et al. (2025) aimed to synthesise literature on the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation globally. The stated aim of the review, to assess what are the proximate causes and underlying drivers of deforestation and forest degradation worldwide, is timely and relevant for ongoing policy efforts, for example zero-deforestation commitments and EU Deforestation [...]
Predicting demographic impacts from sublethal cumulative effects of offshore renewable developments on breeding seabirds
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology, Population Biology
1. Offshore renewable developments (ORDs) are often located in habitat used by protected seabird species and may cause sublethal effects by altering movement patterns and displacing individuals from key resources. Predicting how these effects translate into population-level impacts is challenging for long-lived species because demographic consequences emerge from complex, state-dependent [...]
Eelgrass-associated fishes show large interspecific differences in thermal acclimation to marine heatwaves
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Global warming is increasingly exposing shallow coastal habitats to thermal extremes, with important consequences for the fish species they support. Eelgrass (Zostera marina), the most widespread seagrass in the Northern Hemisphere, provides nursery habitats and foraging opportunities for a high diversity of temperate fishes. However, light limitation is compressing eelgrass depth distribution to [...]
Superorganismal Anisogamy: a Comparative Test of an Extended Theory
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Multicellular organisms and superorganisms (e.g., ant colonies) are both products of major evolutionary transitions in individuality, and they share many analogous traits. Theory developed to explain the evolution of one such trait, anisogamy, has recently been adapted to explain its superorganismal analogue: large egg-like queens and small sperm-like males. To test this theory with comparative [...]
First Report of Bilateral Gynandromorphism in the Australian Ant, Dolichoderus scrobiculatus (Mayr, 1876) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Gynandromorphism is a rare developmental phenomenon producing genetically chimeric individuals expressing both male and female phenotypes simultaneously. Here, I describe the morphological anomalies arising from a case of bilateral worker-male gynandromorphism in the Australian ant Dolichoderus scrobiculatus (Mayr, 1876), collected during a pitfall survey of native ant fauna. The specimen [...]