Preprints
There are 3028 Preprints listed.
Trade-offs between nature and people reveal challenges in translating global conservation targets into national realities
Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Nutrition
Achieving global biodiversity targets depends on the ability of individual countries to translate targets into reality on the ground. In 2022, 196 parties committed to conserving 30% of the planet by 2030, yet questions remain over whether existing protected areas are effective at conserving biodiversity, and furthermore whether conservation successes impact the wellbeing of local communities. We [...]
What's really happening on the Barro Colorado Island 50 ha forest plot?
Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Over the decades, Barro Colorado Island (BCI) has incubated major conceptual and empirical advances in ecology. For example, the theoretical zero-sum multinomial (ZSM), log series, and Poisson log normal (PLN) models have been used to describe abundance distributions and quantify diversity in the BCI 50 ha forest plot. 2. A new model called the compound exponential-geometric series (CEGS) [...]
Rediscovery and Habitat Assessment of the Endemic Philippine Medaka (Oryzias luzonensis) in Northern Luzon
Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
The endemic Philippine medaka Oryzias luzonensis, confined to the Laoag (Padsan) watershed in Ilocos Norte, Northern Luzon, had not been recorded in the wild for over 40 years, prompting its classification as Endangered by the IUCN in 2021. Field surveys conducted from January to May 2024 across six sites using traditional push nets successfully rediscovered the species in three Solsona [...]
Threatened Alpine and Subalpine Ecosystems of Australia: An IUCN Red List of Ecosystems Assessment Version 0.5
Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
DeepResearch_Eco: A Recursive AgenticWorkflow for Complex Scientific Question Answering in Ecology
Published: 2025-07-27
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
We introduce DeepResearch_Eco, a novel agentic LLM-based system for automated scientific synthesis that supports recursive, depth- and breadth-controlled exploration of original research questions—enhancing search diversity and nuance in the retrieval of relevant scientific literature. Unlike conventional retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, DeepResearch enables user-controllable synthesis [...]
Flawed analysis invalidates claim of a strong Yellowstone trophic cascade after wolf reintroduction: A comment on Ripple et al. (2025)
Published: 2025-07-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ripple et al. (2025) recently argued that large carnivore recovery in Yellowstone National Park triggered one of the world’s strongest trophic cascades, citing a ~1500% increase in willow crown volume derived from plant height data. In this comment, we show that their conclusion is invalid due to fundamental methodological flaws. These include use of a tautological volume model, violations of key [...]
The Marsupial Database: A comprehensive dataset on the ecology and life history of American and Australasian marsupials
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Marsupials are an important but typically neglected group of mammals that have been overlooked in many comparative analyses of vertebrate ecology and life-history evolution. In order to address this knowledge bias, we have developed The Marsupial Database. The Marsupial Database contains traits for a phylogenetically diverse set of 414 extant and recently extinct (last 200 years) species from all [...]
Physical and Migration Metrics of White Storks (Ciconia ciconia) and the influence that landfills play in their variation
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Zoology
1. White storks (Ciconia Ciconia) are a traditionally fully migratory species and their numbers in western Europe were decimated in the last century. Their numbers have since boomed and they have altered their migratory strategy to have become a partially migratory species. This change has been ascribed in large part to anthropogenic food subsidies, particularly in the form of landfill sites. 2. [...]
Assessing direct effects of insect change on insectivore populations in the United Kingdom
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
1. Declines in insect abundance are a cause for concern, with potential downstream impacts on the function of ecosystems. Insects are key food resources for insectivorous vertebrates, with evidence that declines in these species could be driven by changing insect abundance. 2. Quantifying the direct effect of insect abundance on vertebrate population dynamics is challenging especially at large [...]
Cover crops influence aboveground and belowground invertebrates in farmlands
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1. Maintaining vegetation diversity through cover crops could counteract the decreasing soil carbon and biodiversity in intensive monoculture farming, but its impacts on fauna have rarely been quantified. 2. To investigate how cover crops influence the abundance and trophic structure of invertebrates, or inorganic N (proxy of soil functioning), barley (Hordeum vulgare) was grown with up to eight [...]
Recruitment bottlenecks and reinforcing environmental degradation drive marsh collapse
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ecosystem collapse is often attributed to the absence of stress-tolerant species, yet many climate-stressed systems fail even when these species remain regionally present. This raises a critical, unresolved question: does collapse result from species pool depletion, or from failed recruitment? We addressed this by combining vegetation surveys and a three-year transplant experiment in sea level [...]
The number of strong social bonds is linked to survival in a cooperative bird
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Recent evidence from large mammals, including humans, shows that the quality of social associations beyond general group size can positively influence health and survival. However, whether individuals in other taxa consistently differ in sociality in ways that affect fitness and thus provide a basis for selection remains largely unexplored. In this study, we examined how individual sociality [...]
Social-ecological networks in urban ecology research
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Urban Studies and Planning
Urban ecosystems are complex and dynamic, shaped by feedback loops between social and ecological components. However, urban ecology requires tools to unravel this complexity. Social-ecological networks (SENs) offer a conceptual and analytical framework by integrating network theory to understand the relationships between and within social-ecological systems. Here, we integrate perspectives from [...]
Latitudinal genetic diversity gradients steepen toward the poles
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Evolution, Genetics, Population Biology
Latitudinal biodiversity gradients are among the best-described biogeographic patterns. However, there is little agreement on whether genetic diversity, the most fundamental level of biodiversity, is also latitudinally distributed. The confusion about the distribution of genetic diversity at biogeographic scales stems in part from the fact that genetic diversity gradients have been described for [...]
Location–scale models in ecology and evolution: heteroscedasticity in continuous, count and proportion data
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ecological data seldom meet the assumption of constant variance. Yet patterns of heteroscedasticity often reflect biologically meaningful variation, such as differences in plasticity or variable responses to environmental stresses. However, most studies model only the mean, treating variance as statistical noise. Here, we describe location–scale regression modeling, which estimates mean [...]