Preprints
There are 2988 Preprints listed.
First Report of Bilateral Gynandromorphism in the Australian Ant, Dolichoderus scrobiculatus (Mayr, 1876) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Gynandromorphism is a rare developmental phenomenon producing genetically chimeric individuals expressing both male and female phenotypes simultaneously. Here, I describe the morphological anomalies arising from a case of bilateral worker-male gynandromorphism in the Australian ant Dolichoderus scrobiculatus (Mayr, 1876), collected during a pitfall survey of native ant fauna. The specimen [...]
Closing the border on Australia’s domestic elephant ivory trade
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Law, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Australia’s domestic market for elephant (Elephantidae ssp.) ivory remains active online, despite long-standing international controls and pledges to close domestic trade. We conducted snapshot monitoring of surface-web vendors (online auction houses and webstores with ‘buy-it-now’ payment options) and a survey of Facebook Marketplace posts made between January and June 2025, sampled every two [...]
Age class and natal origin drive foraging patterns in a reintroduced Cinereous Vulture population
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ornithology
Widespread vulture population declines are often counteracted by conservation strategies including reintroduction programs and supplementary feeding schemes. However, the role of supplementary feeding – focusing on specific, predictable, feeding sites - on movement behaviour, has been little explored, especially within populations in which reintroduced and wild born birds of different age-classes [...]
A new analysis of biodiversity and conservation knowledge products to support environmental assessments
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sustainability
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) second global assessment of the state of biodiversity is in preparation, to be completed in 2028. To support this and other global and regional environmental assessments, we disaggregate three global knowledge products based on IUCN standards (the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Key Biodiversity [...]
Integrating general and targeted biodiversity monitoring through parallel survey designs to improve indicator robustness
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Breeding Bird Monitoring Schemes (BMS) provide large-scale, long-term data essential for biodiversity assessment and conservation decision-making. However, their multispecies design can generate species-specific detectability biases, particularly for taxa whose behavioral or ecological traits deviate from standardized count assumptions, potentially affecting abundance estimates and population [...]
General flowering in temperate forests arises from multi-timescale community synchrony
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Community-wide “general flowering” has been regarded as a tropical phenomenon. Here, we show that temperate forests also exhibit community-wide flowering at the regional scale. Annual seed-production records for seven dominant tree species across 432 forest sites, analysed with timescale-explicit wavelet metrics, reveal landscape-scale synchrony structured by two periods — a 2–4-year band and a [...]
Paronychia leucochthonicola (Caryophyllaceae: Paronychieae), a new species of the San Luis Valley, north-central New Mexico and adjacent Colorado.
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Botany
Paronychia leucochthonicola C.E.V.Alexander sp. nov. is described from two population complexes in the San Luis Valley, one along the Rio Grande Gorge west of Taos (New Mexico), the other centered on Flat Top in the San Luis Hills (Colorado). This is a rare species, occurring in narrow bands of habitat along rimrock. These plants have previously been identified as either Paronychia pulvinata or [...]
Spatial resolution and temperature matter for mapping Cerrado wetlands and dry grasslands
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Wetlands in the Brazilian Cerrado play key roles in regional carbon and water cycles but remain poorly mapped due to their patchy distribution and seasonal variability. Therefore, knowing where and when they occur is urgently needed. To address this gap, we evaluated how spatial resolution and inclusion of thermal (on top of traditional multispectral) data affected wetland vs. dry grassland [...]
The conditional ecology of pest suppression: A general mechanistic framework for predicting landscape effects on biological control
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Landscape heterogeneity often increases natural enemy abundance, yet its effects on crop pest suppression are strikingly inconsistent across empirical studies. We developed a trait-based simulation framework to identify the general mechanisms linking landscape structure to realized pest load. Across >150 in silico experiments, we show that landscape attributes influence biological control by [...]
Factors influencing the use of scientific evidence in conservation practice and policy: insights from a systematic map
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Evidence-based conservation can lead to better outcomes for biodiversity, through the integration of scientific evidence with other forms of knowledge to make transparent and effective decisions. However, despite efforts to promote evidence-based practice, many management and policy decisions do not incorporate scientific information. To strengthen the interface between science and [...]
Systematic review of triploidy among parasitic worms
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Parasitic worms have significant medical, veterinary, and economic importance. Numerous studies have therefore addressed various aspects of parasitic worms’ biology. In contrast, the ploidy of parasitic worms remains comparatively understudied, despite a few known triploid species. Polyploidy is known to have phenotypic and genetic effects in animals, which can lead to changes at the evolutionary [...]
What is a plant chemotype anyway?
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Many plant species show chemical polymorphisms regarding the composition of specialized metabolites belonging to certain chemical families. This led to the classification of chemotypes, that is, groups of plants that can be distinguished by their chemical profiles of metabolites within one chemical family. We present existing definitions and approaches for classifying chemotypes, and describe [...]
Putting the ‘Adaptive’ in Adaptive Monitoring: From Fast Data to Meaningful Ecological Change
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite repeated calls for ‘adaptive monitoring’, monitoring programs typically rely on fixed protocols that fail to capture the complex and dynamic natural world. New technologies offer this long sought flexibility, yet paradoxically risk our ability to detect trends by generating fragmented, high frequency data untethered to broader monitoring objectives. Here, we introduce ROAM [...]
Diversity comes at a cost: multifaceted diversity reduces plant community stability in peatlands
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Understanding how ecological stability relates to diversity is of crucial importance under global change. Greater biodiversity is expected to stabilize aggregate community properties through compensatory dynamics, as species fluctuate asynchronously and offset one another. Yet, diversity-stability relationships are not straightforward and can vary across and within ecosystems, particularly in [...]
Creating opportunities for coexistence to overcome the food–biodiversity challenge
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Coexistence with biodiversity in agricultural landscapes is a global vision by 2050. However, the co-occurrence of wildlife and human food production often results in conflicts which require resolution. Therefore, agroecological landscapes that emerge when sharing land ultimately require achieving human-nature coexistence. We conceptualize human-nature coexistence as an n-dimensional space [...]