Preprints
There are 2569 Preprints listed.
Geography, taxonomy, extinction risk and exposure of fully migratory birds to droughts and cyclones
Published: 2025-02-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Anthropogenic climate change is predicted to drive unprecedented increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events, such as drought and cyclones. The impacts of these events on fully migratory species could be particularly severe and have cascading effects on the functioning of many ecosystems. We explore the relationships between geography, taxonomy, extinction risk and the [...]
Monogenea on exotic Indian freshwater fish. 8. Co-translocation of Cichlidogyrus tilapiae (Monogenea, Dactylogyridae) with pindani Chindongo socolofi (Cichliformes, Cichlidae), the first report of this parasite genus in India
Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Parasitology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Chindongo socolofi (Cichliformes, Cichlidae) is a popular freshwater ornamental fish from Lake Malawi in Africa. Although identifying parasites associated with the global ornamental trade is critical for developing biosecurity practices, little is known about the parasite fauna of C. socolofi. Therefore, this study sought to determine what monogenean parasites C. socolofi harbours in India. Adult [...]
Overcoming “doom and gloom”: Envisioning desirable futures for Arctic biodiversity
Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
We co-created visions of desirable futures for Arctic biodiversity during a workshop which included representatives from academia, Indigenous Peoples, business and policy-making. Appreciating our diverse perspectives, we identified key actions that would enable the positive outcomes shared in our visions: boosting education, rethinking Arctic biodiversity governance, elevating the voices of [...]
Harnessing Large Language Models for Ecological Literature Reviews: A Practical Pipeline
Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed articles and grey literature reports are published every year in ecology and conservation biology. This ever-growing body of knowledge presents new challenges. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly challenging for researchers to stay current on new information and to identify knowledge gaps. Here, we argue that Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s [...]
A new perspective on Squamate social cognition – the use of semiochemicals
Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The Social Intelligence Hypothesis suggests that cognition might be key to enable animals to live in social groups. Especially social cognition is important as it allows animals to respond appropriately to conspecifics and ensure group cohesion. Social cognition is extensively studied in mammals and birds but to gain a broad understanding of the benefits of social cognitive processes in social [...]
Shaped from an early age: behavioural and hormonal phenotypes in juvenile male guinea pigs living in distinct social environments
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Individuals can adjust to different social environments via plastic shaping of behavioural and endocrine phenotypes. As the social environment can change at any time, individuals need to be able to adjust throughout their lives. Our goal was therefore to elucidate when and how behavioural and hormonal adjustments in guinea pigs occur. We focused on juvenility, an important developmental phase [...]
Maximising time-series inclusion reduces geographic and taxonomic biases in the Living Planet Index
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Biodiversity
Measuring how and why biodiversity is changing is critical to protecting it. Among the tools developed to measure biodiversity, one indicator has come under recent scrutiny. The Living Planet Index (LPI) is an indicator based on vertebrate population trends used as evidence for policy and a resource for scientific research; it has a high profile and global reach in the media by conveying a simple [...]
Integrating spatiotemporal and cultural dimensions of animal behavior can enhance conservation
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Behavioral ecology has seen a recent integration of the spatiotemporal and cultural elements of animal behavior. However, similar integration in ecosystem management and wildlife conservation remains an important gap. Here we explore how the intersections among space, time, and culture in animal behavior can inform and enhance conservation practices. Drawing on instructive examples from [...]
Evaluating modelling decisions and spatial predictions in ecosystem mapping
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ecosystem maps support a vast array of applications in conservation, land management and policy. The capacity of an ecosystem map to support these applications is determined by its ability to accurately represent ecosystem distributions, which is heavily influenced by the model used to produce them. Here, we evaluated the influence of key modelling decisions made whilst developing a new and [...]
Coinfection interactions systematically influence parasite diversity estimates in simulated host populations
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Life Sciences, Parasitology
Parasite diversity is a central component of epidemiological dynamics. Parasite diversity is commonly studied across animal populations and species using metrics like parasite species richness; although these metrics generally assume no interactions among parasite species within a community, such interactions are common and important, and could affect parasite diversity estimates in ways that are [...]
The collector practices that shape spatial, temporal, and taxonomic bias in herbaria
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Natural history collections (NHCs) are essential for studying biodiversity. Although spatial, temporal, and taxonomic biases in NHCs affect analyses, the influence of collector practices on biases remains largely unexplored. We utilized one million digitized specimens collected in the northeastern United States from 237 herbaria and analyzed contributions from ~10,000 collectors. We investigated [...]
The business case for investing in biodiversity data
Published: 2025-02-04
Subjects: Biodiversity
1. There is urgent demand for biodiversity data driven by the need to assess impacts, dependencies, risks, and to implement nature-based solutions. In a data-driven economy, without access to robust data and the tools built from it, public and private sector actors cannot reliably evaluate their relationships with biodiversity or the outcomes of any sustainable nature-positive intervention.2. [...]
Plant invasions reduce the degree of nestedness on warm temperate islands
Published: 2025-02-03
Subjects: Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Questions Understanding the composition and structure of island floras is crucial for making informed conservation decisions, especially in the context of biological invasions. Island floras are often nested, i.e. species-poor assemblages are frequently subsets of species-rich ones. However, the circumstances under which this occurs on islands are often unclear. To gain insight into the processes [...]
Diverse hosts, diverse immune systems: evolutionary variation in bat immunology
Published: 2025-02-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
The ability of multiple bat species to host zoonotic pathogens without showing disease has fostered growing interest in bat immunology, indicating ways immune systems may differ between bats and other vertebrates. However, interspecific variation in immunological diversity among bats has only begun to be recognized. The order Chiroptera accounts for over 20% of all mammal species and shows [...]
Land use gradients drive spatial variation in Lassa fever host communities in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone.
Published: 2025-02-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Epidemiology, Life Sciences, Virus Diseases
The natal multimammate mouse (Mastomys natalensis) is the primary reservoir host of Lassa mammarenavirus (LASV), a zoonotic pathogen causing Lassa fever that is endemic to West Africa. The occurrence and abundance of this species is regulated by the human environment and biotic interactions with other small-mammal species, but these ecological drivers remain poorly understood in the regions [...]