Preprints
There are 2515 Preprints listed.
Faecal n-alkanes differ significantly between two lemur species reflecting differences in consumed diet
Published: 2025-08-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
The diet of an animal reflects its species’ ecology and local food availability and is often a key metric for monitoring the health and welfare of endangered species. However, determining diets across individuals and through space and time, is an inherent challenge within ecology, being expensive and time-intensive to accomplish with observations. Faeces offer the opportunity for non-invasive [...]
Tracking the hidden niches: Movement-based insights into northern lapwing intraspecific variation and conservation
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Zoology
Context. Global monitoring data reveal farmland bird population declines, primarily driven by agricultural intensification, chemical inputs, and climate shifts. The northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), a ground-nesting wader adapted to lowland agricultural matrices, exemplifies this decline across Europe. Objectives. This study quantified intraspecific variation in habitat selection to evaluate [...]
Exploring the Integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Artificial Intelligence to Mitigate Human-Wildlife Conflict in Kerala, India
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Increasing human-wildlife conflict (HWC) in forest-fringe landscapes necessitates innovative and culturally acceptable mitigation strategies. This note proposes integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mitigate HWC in Kerala. The proposition aims to translate African rural traditional knowledge of using alarm calls of Guinea fowls (Numida meleagris) [...]
Causal models as a scientific framework for next-generation ecosystem and climate-linked stock assessments
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Rapid changes in marine ecosystems highlight the need to account for time-varying productivity in stock assessment models used to support fisheries management. Common approaches incorporate annual variation or regress processes like recruitment, natural mortality, or growth on environmental covariates. While the latter represents a step towards biological realism, it often fails accounting for [...]
From reintroduction to extinction risk: past, present and future of the newly established population of Ospreys in southern Iberia
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biodiversity is declining due to the ongoing environmental global change, and raptors are among the most threatened animal groups. To counteract their decline, birds of prey have frequently been the focus of reintroduction programs worldwide. However, newly established populations must be continuously monitored to assess both short- and long-term success. In this work, we investigate the case of [...]
Abundant empirical evidence of multilevel selection revealed by a bibliometric review
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Natural selection is based on the notion of differential reproduction between entities, often characterized as a struggle between individual organisms. However, natural selection can act at all levels of biological organization, thus being termed ‘multilevel selection’ (MLS). A common misconception is that MLS lacks empirical support. To address this, we conducted a bibliometric review of 2,950 [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. Mangroves of the Sahelian
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Sahelian is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Gulf of Guinea West and the Sahelian Upwelling. The Sahelian mangrove province had a mapped extent of 1883.0 km2 in 2020, representing 1.3% of the global mangrove area. The biota is characterised by 6 species of true mangroves and many [...]
Density dependence revisited: strong evidence for superlinear population growth
Published: 2025-07-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Density dependence is a core principle in ecological and evolutionary theory, and yet the precise nature of the relationship between per capita growth and population size continues to ignite debate. While sublinear (convex/decelerating) density dependence is frequently observed in empirical studies, standard techniques for estimating density dependence are prone to unreliable inference. At the [...]
Illegal cattle trade brings New World Screwworm to wildlife and continues to destroy protected areas in Mesoamerica
Published: 2025-07-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Diseases, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Parasitic Diseases, Parasitology, Public Health, Veterinary Preventive Medicine, Epidemiology, and Public Health
The New World Screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax; “screwworm”) is a parasitic fly historically endemic to the Americas. Females lay eggs in open wounds of warm-blooded animals, including humans. The emerging larvae feed on the host’s living tissue, often resulting in severe damage and potentially death. After five decades of coordinated efforts, the screwworm was successfully eradicated from [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Gulf of Guinea - North
Published: 2025-07-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Gulf of Guinea - North is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Gulf of Guinea Central, Gulf of Guinea Upwelling, Gulf of Guinea West. The Gulf of Guinea - North mangrove province mapped extent in 2020 was 6961.2 km2 across, representing 4.7% of the global mangrove area. The biota is characterized [...]
A new model to quantify the probability of collision between birds and aircraft: applications for onboard lighting
Published: 2025-07-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Globally, bird and aircraft collisions are a major safety hazard and monetary expense for the aviation industry. Empirical evidence suggests that the behavioral response of the animal just prior to a collision is a critical factor in determining whether a collision occurs. However, no theoretical framework exists to predict the probability of a collision based on the escape response of the animal [...]
Evolutionary Origins of the Blood Vascular System in Metazoans – A Microbial Perspective
Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
This opinion piece posits two intertwined major evolutionary transformations – the advent of the circulatory system in animals and the subsequent emergence of sterile organismal compartments it enabled – as promoted by microbial communities. These transformations should be considered significant in that they shaped the ability of downstream multicellular organisms to diverge and attain new [...]
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 [...]