Preprints
There are 3447 Preprints listed.
Decadal-scale climate cycles preserved in megaherbivore dental tissues in tropical Asia
Published: 2026-07-13
Subjects: Climate, Paleontology
Rainforests have emerged as key biomes for understanding the initial dispersal of modern humans from Africa. In Southeast Asia, the oldest dated records of humans are associated with rainforests, but recent fossil records suggest these biomes were structurally different from today. Climatic fluctuations associated with insolation changes brought about smooth transitions between rain, dry and [...]
Insect movement and spatial dynamics determine trap crop effectiveness
Published: 2026-07-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Trap cropping diverts pest pressure away from cash crops, yet its effectiveness depends on pest movement behaviour and the retention or removal processes that occur after insects reach trap plants. We develop a one-dimensional movement-based modelling framework in which pest trajectories follow a biased correlated random walk within a spatially structured field containing trap-crop interception [...]
Climate isolation and percolation as drivers of terrestrial vertebrate richness
Published: 2026-07-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Global biodiversity impact spillovers of national transportation systems
Published: 2026-07-13
Subjects: Biodiversity
Transportation systems cause well-documented local biodiversity impacts and substantial greenhouse gas emissions, yet the global biodiversity impacts embedded in their value chains remain poorly understood. Here, we quantify the life cycle biodiversity and carbon footprints of Finland’s national transportation system, covering traffic, transport infrastructure, and vehicle production and [...]
The warmer, the yellower? Colour patterns of fire salamanders across different scales in the face of rising temperatures
Published: 2026-07-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
The unprecedented increase in global temperatures might lead to phenotypical changes in many species to account for increased thermoregulatory processes. This could be due to increased selection pressures on traits such as colouration or body size. Using specimens from the Natural History Museum in Vienna for a long-term series and recent data from an ongoing fire salamander monitoring programme [...]
Precipitation predictability shapes plant growth trajectories, climate sensitivity, and fitness pathways within and across generations
Published: 2026-07-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Environmental predictability is increasingly altered under climate change, particularly through shifts in the temporal structure and autocorrelation of climatic variables. In plants, the interaction between precipitation predictability and temporal climatic variation can shape the magnitude, timing, and trajectory of growth, with cascading effects on phenological coordination, and ultimately on [...]
Marine subsidies, spatial heterogeneity, and territoriality drive trophic ecology in desert predators
Published: 2026-07-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Allochthonous (including marine) subsidies can have far-reaching effects on recipient ecosystems. By altering local resource availability, the combined effects of these subsidies and landscape heterogeneity can structure consumer diets, shape communities and influence ecosystem dynamics. 2. We examined how marine subsidies, landscape heterogeneity, and territoriality drive resource use in [...]
The roles of contrasting host types on the environmental abundance of Anaplasma phagocytophilum, an emerging zoonotic pathogen
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fundamental knowledge of the role of hosts in shaping vector-borne pathogen abundance is critical to understanding the ecology of these disease systems; yet the roles can be challenging to tease apart, especially for pathogens vectored by generalist feeders with multiple hosts. In this study, we aimed to quantify the relative contributions of hypothesised pathogen transmission hosts (deer and [...]
From Scalable Biodiversity Measurement to Credible Biodiversity Metrics
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Business, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Economics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistical Models, Sustainability, Technology and Innovation
Governments struggle to develop effective policies to counter the decline of species and ecosystems. An obstacle to command-and-control and incentive-based mechanisms is that biodiversity is costly to measure, creating an information asymmetry in which firms and governments are incentivised to withhold information on adverse impacts. Using a principal-agent model, we show that credible reporting [...]
Sniffing for fungi: Use of a conservation dog uncovers high regional truffle diversity
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Hypogeous aromatic fungi (‘truffles’) contribute significantly to overall fungal diversity but are difficult to find using traditional survey methods because they fruit underground, leading to under-documentation and a lack of understanding of truffle ecology. Truffles evolved to emit strong aromatic compounds to attract mycophagists for spore dispersal, a trait that culinary truffle harvesters [...]
Efficient Bayesian Estimation for Open Population Capture-Recapture Models Without Data Augmentation
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
1. Bayesian estimation of abundance with capture-recapture data has been dominated for nearly 20 years by the parameter-expansion data-augmentation (PX-DA) ap- proach. The PX-DA approach expands the parameter set to include the latent true states of the individuals. PX-DA allows straightforward coding of models in MCMC software such as JAGS (Just Another Gibbs Sampler) or nimble, however, this [...]
Dark fragmentation: daylighting hidden disconnections in river networks
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
River fragmentation is a central driver of freshwater biodiversity loss, yet its true extent is often underestimated due to incomplete barrier inventories, static river maps, and simplified assumptions about barrier passability. We propose dark fragmentation as the hidden component of river-network disconnection arising from three interacting dimensions: inventory darkness caused by unmapped [...]
Mammal diversity survey in Dakatcha Woodland, Kenya: Results from a four-year camera trap survey (2019-2022)
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Zoology
The Dakatcha Woodland is one of the largest formally unprotected coastal forests in the Northern Swahili Coastal Forests bioregion and faces severe threats from widespread deforestation. To develop a comprehensive mammal checklist for the area, we deployed 10 camera traps over four years (2019 –2022), totalling 122 deployments and 6,779 trap days. This survey identified 28 mammal species, [...]
A comprehensive dataset on plant-associated invertebrates and gardening activities, from 100 sites across five urban green space types in Zurich, Lugano, and Geneva, Switzerland
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
This dataset describes plant-associated invertebrates, gardening activities, and habitat diversity across five urban green spaces (UGS) types in the cities of Zurich, Lugano, and Geneva, Switzerland. The UGS types, namely allotment lot, private garden, residential estate, park, and ruderal area, cover different purposes, ownership, and management regimes. While Zurich was the core study region, [...]
Threat intensification reshapes trait-response relationships in birds and mammals
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Predicting which species are most at risk of extinction, and by which threats, is central to effective biodiversity management (1). Trait-based frameworks, linking species traits to extinction risk, are increasingly used to predict global biodiversity trends, with applications from species-specific prioritisations (2) to estimations of global diversity loss (3). However, despite the strong [...]