Preprints
There are 2749 Preprints listed.
Neighborhood habitat gains increase plant species richness in forest fragments
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Theory and indirect evidence suggest that when new habitat is added to a habitat fragment’s local landscape, or “neighborhood”, species richness in the fragment will increase. Although this hypothesis is frequently assumed, it has not yet been tested directly with longitudinal data. In a natural forest regeneration experiment on Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island, we use causal inference to show [...]
Minimum Sampling, Maximum Insight: Tracking Environmental Trends in a Tidal Estuary
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
Long-term environmental monitoring is essential for detecting ecological trends and managing dynamic systems. In estuarine environments, where monitoring is often constrained by cost and logistics, efficient resource allocation is key to sustaining effective programs. We developed a framework to optimize spatial and temporal sampling in the Great Bay Estuary (New Hampshire/Maine, USA), [...]
Ocean warming drives abrupt declines in fish productivity at global scale
Published: 2025-05-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Marine life is under multiple pressures, including climate change and overfishing. Environmental change and variability can threaten fishery sustainability, especially when it results in large, abrupt and persistent shifts in productivity of fish stocks. Reports of abrupt shifts in marine systems are not uncommon, but a global assessment of their occurrence and drivers is seriously lacking. Here, [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. Sandy Beaches & Dunes of the Gulf of Guinea North
Published: 2025-05-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
The sandy beaches and dunes of the Gulf of Guinea North is a regional ecosystem subgroup along the West African coast. It had a mapped extent of 256 km² in 2022, with a width ranging from of 0.01 km to 1.02 km, and stretches over approximately 2481 km. This ecosystem subgroup extends along the shores of Benin, Togo, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Guinea Bissau. This [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. Sandy Beaches & Dunes of the West African Transition
Published: 2025-05-22
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Abstract The ‘Sandy Beaches and Dunes of the West African Transition’ form a regional ecosystem subgroup along the West African coast. It had a mapped extent of 584 km² in 2022, with a width ranging from 0.012 km to 4.796 km, and stretching over approximately 1321 km. This ecosystem subgroup extends along the shores of Mauritania, The Gambia and Senegal. This ecosystem frequently experiences [...]
Revisiting the copepod diversity of Indian Sundarbans through estimation of carcasses
Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Diversity assessment of plankton traditionally considers species richness and abundance, overlooking the vital state of individuals (i.e., alive or dead). This study aimed to integrate the vital state of zooplankters into diversity indices, using the copepods of the Indian Sundarbans (IS) as an example community. It was hypothesized that when carcasses estimation (CE) is incorporated diversity [...]
Filling Monitoring Gaps for Data-deficient Species Using Annual Occupancy Predictions from Co-occurrence Models
Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Fragmented surveys and limited monitoring have excluded most invertebrates from conservation policy. We present a fill-in framework that uses species distribution models (SDMs) to reconstruct missing annual trends—not to extrapolate trends, but to fill them in. Instead of filtering data-sparse regions or years or relying on static environmental variables, we used co-occurrence patterns (COP) as [...]
Toward Ecological Forecasting of West Nile Virus in Florida: Insights from Two Decades of Surveillance
Published: 2025-05-20
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Models, Virus Diseases
West Nile Virus (WNV) is the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the United States, yet transmission activity remains difficult to predict. This study used 20 years of digitized WNV seroconversion data from 526 sentinel chicken coops across Florida to develop spatiotemporal models with landscape and climate variables to predict WNV seroconversion at monthly and seasonal timescales. We [...]
NextGeneration specimen digitization: The international herbarium community goes spectral!
Published: 2025-05-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Spectral reflectance measured from herbarium specimens represents a vast source of plant phenotypic and functional trait data. 2. The potential to capture data from specimens to enhance knowledge of plant function and taxon identification has inspired many laboratories worldwide to initiate next-generation spectral digitization from specimens. 3. Combining these datasets into a coordinated [...]
Multimodal data integration to model, predict, and understand changes in plant biodiversity: a systematic review
Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
The integration of multimodal data to analyze, model, and predict changes in plant biodiversity is critical for addressing global conservation challenges. This systematic review examines the current landscape of plant biodiversity data, focusing on the identification, classification, and evaluation of key open-access data sources and integration methodologies. We highlight the strengths and [...]
Nestbox use is linked to increased paternity loss in infected blue tits, but not great tits
Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Host-parasite interactions and reproductive strategies are critical aspects of avian life history, yet knowledge of their interplay in the context of nesting site microhabitat, in particular between natural and artificial nesting sites, is lacking. The choice of nesting site is critical for successful breeding, by ensuring protection from predators and a suitable environment for incubation and [...]
Disordered systems in community ecology: a tutorial
Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A basic fact of community ecology is that most ecosystems are comprised of many species and processes. Mathematical models trying to capture these ingredients and explain empirical phenomena usually face the problem of having vast numbers of unknown parameters and uncertain assumptions. It is not obvious when such mathematical models can truly be quantitatively predictive, or even conceptually [...]
Oxygen supersaturation has negligible effects on warming tolerance in aquatic ectotherms
Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Under the midday sun when photosynthesizers are producing oxygen, shallow aquatic ecosystems can become supersaturated with oxygen (>100% air saturation) while they simultaneously peak in water temperature. It has been suggested that oxygen supersaturation could protect water-breathing animals from mortality during heatwaves because of the potential role of oxygen in governing thermal [...]
Reply to: Maximising time-series inclusion reduces geographic and taxonomic biases in the Living Planet Index
Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Biodiversity
In their recent communication, "Maximising time-series inclusion reduces geographic and taxonomic biases in the Living Planet Index" (https://doi.org/10.32942/X2M33C), McRae et al. have raised objections to our study, "Mathematical biases in the calculation of the Living Planet Index lead to overestimation of vertebrate population decline" (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49070-x). In this [...]
State-space models and inference approaches for aquatic animal tracking with passive acoustic telemetry and biologging sensors
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Passive acoustic telemetry systems are widely deployed to track animals in aquatic environments. However, investments in integrative methods of data analysis have remained comparatively limited, with current workflows typically considering individual movements separately from space use, home ranges and residency. 2. This review presents a unifying perspective that bridges this divide. We [...]