Preprints
There are 3682 Preprints listed.
Identification of the Cichlid Fishes of Lake Malawi/Nyasa Part 2: Pseudotropheina (the ‘mbuna’ sub-radiation).
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
With an estimated 900-1000 species, the cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi represent the largest known adaptive radiation of vertebrates from a single common ancestor in a limited geographical area, in this case a single lake. They provide an outstanding opportunity to study the rapid diversification of form and function on a limited genetic background and to attempt understand why lineages vary so [...]
Bridging the science-business gap: from biodiversity measurement to action
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Business, Life Sciences
Biodiversity is the living fabric of our planet, and its loss poses growing risks to human well-being, ecological resilience, and business profitability. Yet businesses often lack the information and incentives to align decisions with nature stewardship. We argue that several conditions are essential to sustain biodiversity and a habitable planet. First, monitoring multiple components of [...]
Designing optimal biodiversity observation networks
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Meeting the goals of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) requires a substantial increase in biodiversity monitoring effort, motivating the development of a Global Biodiversity Observing System (GBiOS). However, GBiOS cannot be built without a practical framework for designing effective biodiversity monitoring networks that balances budgetary constraints with competing policy objectives, which [...]
Acoustic Vector Sensing of Blue and Fin Whale Habitat Occupancy off Central California
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Population Biology
Temporally varying geographic distributions of whale populations are difficult to visually monitor across large marine ecosystems. Acoustic vector sensing (AVS) of the powerful calls produced by baleen whales enables continuous monitoring over large areas with spatial information contained in the bearing estimates to whales. Using three years of AVS data in Monterey Bay National Marine [...]
Fire modulates millennial plant community assembly
Published: 2026-09-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
How ecological communities maintain resilience under recurrent disturbance remains unclear because the processes governing persistence often unfold over centuries to millennia. Using fossil pollen and charcoal records spanning up to 14,000 years from mountain ecosystems in Europe and Africa, we reconstructed temporal networks of community predictability to investigate the role of fire in [...]
Alternative proteins are likely essential for biodiversity conservation
Published: 2026-09-14
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Animal-sourced foods play a major role in four of the five greatest drivers of biodiversity loss, and the conservation community must do more to address the threats that animal-sourced foods pose. While a variety of tools can help address the problems posed by animal-sourced foods, conservation must prioritize strategies that enable sustainability gains at scale to achieve global consensus goals [...]
Global patterns of fish–macrocrustacean interactions in freshwater environments: a systematic review
Published: 2026-09-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Understanding species interactions is central to ecology, yet they remain one of the least documented dimensions of biodiversity (the Eltonian shortfall). Most studies have focused on terrestrial vertebrates, while aquatic vertebrates and invertebrates are still poorly understood. Here, we assessed broad patterns in the published literature on interactions between fishes and macrocrustaceans [...]
Environmental water management and H5 bird flu in waterbirds: Context and scenarios for decision-making
Published: 2026-09-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The impact of animal viruses has dramatically increased over the last decade globally, exemplified by the disruption caused by the recent panzootic of high pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b (H5 bird flu), which has caused the deaths of millions of wild birds and mammals, as well as domestic animals such as poultry. Wild waterbirds play a role in the spread of H5 bird flu [...]
Integrating morphometric and spectral evidence for species discrimination in Amazonian trees: a case study of Carapa (Meliaceae)
Published: 2026-09-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Reliable species-level identification of Amazonian trees from herbarium and field material is essential for conservation, management, and economic use of non-timber forest products, yet overlapping morphology and inconsistent identifications often hinder it. Using three Amazonian species of Carapa (C. guianensis, C. surinamensis, and C. vasquezii) as a case study, we tested whether leaf [...]
A Sharma–Mittal Geometry of Evenness: Representation, Cardinal Resolution, and Relative Merits
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The proliferation of evenness indices creates an interpretive problem whenever several admissible measures assign different numerical values to the same assemblage. We study that problem by normalizing Sharma–Mittal entropy to its maximum at complete uniformity. Written in terms of the Hill number of order α, the resulting surface is [...]
The coefficient of variation of body mass (and other traits)
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Variation is a fundamental property of populations and provides the raw material upon which evolutionary processes can act. The coefficient of variation, defined as the standard deviation divided by the arithmetic mean, is widely used in evolutionary biology to quantify relative variation, for example to draw conclusions about the strength of selection. However, comparing coefficients of [...]
Evaluating vibroacoustic sensor performance and vibration attenuation: implications for soil biodiversity sampling
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Entomology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Earth’s biodiversity is undergoing substantial changes in response to anthropogenic stressors, creating a need for efficient methods of assessing biodiversity, particularly in soil ecosystems where sampling remains challenging. Soil vibroacoustics - the use of substrate-borne vibrations or sounds to quantify or detect below-ground biological activity – offers a potentially rapid and scalable [...]
Composition or encounter? Decomposing the altitude and night-time damage premiums in wildlife strikes to civil aircraft in the United States
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Damaging wildlife strikes to civil aircraft are commoner above 500 ft and at night, patterns usually attributed to the animals involved. Using the FAA National Wildlife Strike Database (354,564 reports, 1990–2026), damage probabilities were directly standardised to a common taxon mix under three standard populations, separately for aircraft up to and above 5,700 kg. Standardisation removed 66 to [...]
Heterogeneity in Microbial Systems: Scales, Drivers, and Consequences
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
Heterogeneity is a fundamental, multi-scale organizing principle of microbial life, transcending its historical treatment as mere statistical noise. This review synthesizes recent advances to construct a unified framework for understanding microbial heterogeneity across hierarchical scales—from molecular and cellular phenotypic diversity, through strain-level genomic micro-diversity, to [...]
The Little Reptilian Lion: A Literature Review and Field Perspective on the Behavioral Ecology of Agama picticauda (Peter's Rock Agama)
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Life Sciences, Zoology
Agama picticauda (Peter's Rock Agama) is one of West Africa's most abundant and visually striking lizards, yet remains profoundly understudied at the level of behavioral ecology. This review draws on published literature and extended personal field observation of wild populations in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, to document the species' behavioral complexity and argue for dedicated long-term research. [...]