Biodiversity Research - Science topic

This article serves as the introduction to the special issue on bioacoustics in tropical ecosystems, published in collaboration with Philosophical Transactions B. It provides an overview of current advances in the use of acoustic monitoring to study biodiversity, ecosystem dynamics, and conservation challenges in tropical environments. For more inf...

Urban ecology is a rapidly expanding discipline depicting cities as dynamic ecosystems that foster new ecological interactions between organisms. This study highlights the pivotal role of biodiversity research in urban landscapes, advancing urban ecology and spurring the emergence of “urban taxonomy”—the discovery of new species in urban ecosystems...

Growing numbers of biodiversity monitoring data recorded by camera trap devices are becoming increasingly difficult to manage and analyze. The WildLIVE platform is being developed to address these challenges by providing a comprehensive virtual research environment (VRE) that integrates citizen science, machine learning-based annotation, and geo-an...

The article titled "The UNAM Wildlife Campus: Redefining Conservation and Research at the Heart of KAZA" by Daniel Munyanya discusses the pivotal role of the UNAM Wildlife Campus in Katima Mulilo, Namibia, located at the gateway to the Kavango–Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA). It emphasizes the campus's potential to transform con...

India, as one of the world’s megadiverse countries, faces significant challenges in documenting and conserving its rich biodiversity due to habitat loss, climate change, and resource limitations. Traditional taxonomic methods, while foundational, are often time-consuming and inaccessible, necessitating innovative solutions to accelerate biodiversit...

Premise Biodiversity researchers often need to answer the question: “Which species of taxon X have been documented in (or near) spatial polygon Y?” Online databases with billions of occurrence records, including vouchered specimens and citizen science records, can provide the answer; however, quick spatial processing of huge biodiversity datasets c...

Purpose of Review Forest biodiversity is heavily influenced by structural conditions. In the past, forest stand structure was primarily quantified by traditional one- or two-dimensional metrics and indices. Close-range remote sensing enables researchers for the first time to reproduce and digitalize the three-dimensional structure of forests in hig...

The collection of biodiversity data is possible by non-professionals and this is part of a not-canonical and interdisciplinary approach on scientific research called “citizen science”. One of the most important factors which accelerated the development of citizen science in the last decade has been the use of mobile devices which incorporate sensor...

The exponential growth of data due to technological developments, combined with the increased recognition of research data as a relevant research output over the last decades, highlights fundamental challenges in terms of interoperability, reproducibility and re-use of scientific information. Research in Earth System Science is at its core cross-di...

Global biodiversity is changing at unprecedented rates during the Anthropocene. Whereas current biodiversity patterns can be observed directly, information from the recent past is far less easily retrieved yet urgently needed to understand present observations and predict future developments. For plants, herbaria offer such a unique glimpse into th...

The current inventories of elasmobranchs in the Sea of Marmara have some taxonomic problems that need to be solved. One problematic species in the elasmobranch fauna of the region is Raja clavata Linnaeus, 1758, and atypically coloured specimens of this skate species may have been misidentified in the past as congeners or closely related species....

The Invertebrate Division of the Museum of Zoology of the Universidad Nacional de Loja (LOUNAZ) plays a leading role for the study, conservation, and education of invertebrate diversity in southern Ecuador, a region historically underrepresented in biodiversity research. Since its establishment in 2020, the division houses a collection of over 20,0...

The discovery of termite species in Uzbekistan has gained significant attention in recent years. Historically, the termite fauna of this region was represented by two lower termite species, Anacanthotermes turkestanicus and Anacanthotermes ahngerianus (Togaev U, 2024; Tilyabaev Z, 2017; Togaev et al, 2023). However, recent findings have revealed th...

Biodiversity, climate, geodiversity and ocean systems are intricately linked and form the basis of the Earth’s ecological balance. The integration of geospatial data, molecular techniques and advanced computational tools has diversified the utility of research for sustainable biodiversity management. Remote sensing together with environmental DNA t...

Name-bearing type specimens have a fundamental role in characterising biodiversity, as these objects represent the physical link between a scientific name and the biological organism. Type specimens are usually deposited in natural history collections, which provide key infrastructure for research on essential biological structures and processes, w...

Faba bean (Vicia faba L.) is an important grain legume with high protein content (approximately 25-30%) and has high nutritional value. It is mainly cultivated in winter for human consumption and as animal feed. According to FAOSTAT (2020), the total growing area of the broad bean reaches 2.5 million hectares and yields more than 4.5 million tons....

We present CrypticBio, the largest publicly available multimodal dataset of visually confusing species, specifically curated to support the development of AI models in the context of biodiversity applications. Visually confusing or cryptic species are groups of two or more taxa that are nearly indistinguishable based on visual characteristics alone...

Biodiversity research requires complete and detailed information to study ecosystem dynamics at different scales. Employing data-driven methods like Machine Learning is getting traction in ecology and more specific biodiversity, offering alternative modelling pathways. For these methods to deliver accurate results there is the need for large, curat...

Biological diversity in mountain ecosystems has been increasingly studied over the last decade. This is also the case for mountain soils, but no study to date has provided an overall synthesis of the current state of knowledge. Here we fill this gap with a first global analysis of published research on cryptogams, microorganisms, and fauna in mount...

The growing demand for scalable biodiversity monitoring methods has fuelled interest in remote sensing data, due to its widespread availability and extensive coverage. Traditionally, the application of remote sensing to biodiversity research has focused on mapping and monitoring habitats, but with increasing availability of large-scale citizen-scie...

Caves and subterranean habitats in general support a unique set of organisms that are adapted to the dark and nutrient-limited environment. The high selection pressure and limited gene flow between semi-isolated caves have generally resulted in a high level of endemicity among the depauperate cave fauna. The cave fauna is vulnerable to a range of a...

Freshwater ecosystems are increasingly threatened by climate change and anthropogenic activities, necessitating innovative and scalable monitoring solutions. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative tool in aquatic biodiversity research, enabling automated species identification, predictive habitat modeling, and conservation pla...

Marine biodiversity researchers require state-of-the-art computational tools for precise fish species identification. To better segment, localize, and classify fish, this work introduces a new Vision Transformer (ViT) fusion model. This system tackles important problems in automated marine species recognition by integrating state-of-the-art transfo...

Identifying key drivers of insect diversity decline in the Anthropocene remains a major challenge in biodiversity research. Metabarcoding has rapidly gained popularity for species identification, yet the lack of abundance data complicates accurate diversity metrics like sample coverage-standardized species richness. Additionally, the vast number of...

Aim The urgency for remote, reliable and scalable biodiversity monitoring amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems has sparked worldwide interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM), which can track life underwater and on land. However, we lack a unified methodology to report this sampling effort and a comprehensive overview of PAM coverage t...

This is the cover page of the May 2025 issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution, which features an article we coauthored on Arctic coastal biodiversity research.

Amblypygi, commonly known as tailless whip scorpions or whip spiders, is an order of Arachnida noted for its cryptic habits and predominantly tropical and subtropical distribution. Although the group was first mentioned on the island of Cyprus in 1990, no specific taxonomic information was provided at the time. Through a combination of literature r...

Natural history collections are fundamental for biodiversity research. The broad use of them relies on the digitization effort, especially georeferencing that translates textual locality descriptions into geographic coordinates. However, traditional georeferencing approaches are labor-intensive and costly, thus georeferencing is a major bottleneck...

. The paper presents brief results biodiversity research under the framework of international long-term cooperation in the Amur River basin. The priorities of migratory bird conservation as well wetlands and mountain taiga ecosystems maintenance are considered. The problems of conservation of faunal diversity, conservation of rare animal species an...

The tropical Southeast Asian region, with its unique geographical features, is home to a multitude of distinct species that are affected by various human and natural activities. The availability of biodiversity data is crucial for understanding species distribution and responses to environmental changes to develop effective conservation priorities....

Understanding the factors that predispose species and populations to decline and extinction is a major challenge of biodiversity research. In the present study, we investigated the historical population genomics of an extinct population of the European oyster (Ostrea edulis L.) from the Wadden Sea collected between 1868 and 1888, and compared it to...

DNA barcoding, the use of standard segments of DNA to assign specimens to a species, has emerged as a major field of biodiversity research over the last 20 years. Large-scale global initiatives are building DNA barcode reference libraries for animals, fungi, and plants, while pipelines are being developed for metabarcoding-based biomonitoring. The...

This editorial introduces the Special Collection “Grasslands of Asia” in Vegetation Classification and Survey, highlighting the urgent need for systematic vegetation classification across Asia’s diverse grassland ecosystems. Despite their vast ecological, climatic, and cultural significance, Asian grasslands remain underrepresented in global vegeta...

Urban voids, such as vacant lots, brownfields, fallow land, wasteland, and the spaces between buildings, have the potential to serve as habitats for a diverse range of plants. However, their value for plant conservation remains understudied because of their informal and neglected nature. The aim of this systematic review is to consider the potentia...

Understanding the links between biodiversity and human aesthetic perception is vital for designing favourable urban environments and aligning conservation goals with well-being agendas. Despite evidence supporting the preference for beautiful and biodiverse landscapes, inconsistencies exist. This study aims to review the empirical literature on aes...

The iDiv Female Scientists initiative at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig in Germany was set up to connect women in science and to raise awareness of gender inequity. In this article we discuss the impact of the workplace environment on women in academia. Our experiences indicate that supportive work...

Biodiversity research is a key element in natural resource management and conservation, especially in large ecosystems such as biosphere reserves. In this context, the dynamics of changes in the plant species diversity on the territory of the Carpathian Biosphere Reserve were analyzed for 2010–2023. The research aimed to study the impact of ecologi...

Background This dataset comprises detailed information on 2,134 Pycnogonida specimens stored in the Ocean Benthic Fauna collection (collection code: OBFc) of the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology (IORAS). These specimens were collected over a span of 77 years, since 1947, from 996 distinct localities across various regions of the World Ocean. The IO...

Drosophila and parasitic wasps in the genus Leptopilina have long been a model for understanding host-parasite interactions. Indeed, parasitic wasps are important drivers of ecological and evolutionary processes broadly, but we are generally lacking information about the diversity, natural history, and evolution of these relationships. We collected...

Taxonomic uncertainty is prevalent across many biological groups. Yet it remains overlooked in ecology, evolution, and conservation research, leading to potential misinterpretations of biodiversity patterns. Here, we synthesize the recent literature to define taxonomic uncertainty, examine its root causes and consequences, and present key metrics f...

Bocas del Toro is an archipelago on the Caribbean coast of Panamá, recognized as a biodiversity hotspot. While marine red macroalgae in the Western Atlantic are well studied, the marine flora of Panamá, particularly Bocas del Toro, remains underexplored using DNA barcoding. This study documents the diversity of marine red macroalgae in the region u...

Background: The rising prevalence of neurological disorders in East Africa highlights a significant disparity between the escalating disease burden and the region's capacity for neuroscience research and healthcare provision. Factors such as inadequate training, limited funding, insufficient research infrastructure, and brain drain of skilled profe...

Aims Australia's coastline is fringed by more than 8000 continental islands. These islands feature a diverse array of landforms, rock and soil types and geological origins. Some of these islands are among the least invaded, most pristine habitats in Australia and support high plant diversity. Here, we present a new Australia‐wide curated dataset fo...

DNA metabarcoding is revolutionizing biodiversity research by providing rapid and efficient ways of collecting species occurrence data. However, it has not yet been effectively applied to many taxonomic groups, mainly due to a significant lack of reference sequences and dedicated protocols. One such group is the tardigrades - a charismatic phylum o...

There is a lack of awareness that the current biodiversity knowledge has a long history of individual and institutional scientific enquiries well before the term was coined. Here, we deal specifically with the ornithological work coordinated by Antonio Carruccio, who was Head of the Institute of Zoology at Rome University from 1883 to 1914. An advo...

The fields of taxonomy and biodiversity research have witnessed an exponential growth in published literature. This vast corpus of articles holds information on the diverse biological traits of organisms and their ecologies. However, access to and extraction of relevant data from this extensive resource remain challenging. Advances in text and data...

Biodiversity is essential for the resilience and stability of life, yet it is highly dynamic and has continuously evolved throughout Earth’s history. The biodiversity concept encompasses three hierarchical levels of equal importance to fundamental ecological processes: diversity at the ecosystem, species and genetic levels. The current biodiversity...

La Fondation pour la recherche sur la biodiversité (FRB) a organisé le 30 juin 2023 sa journée annuelle sur la recommandation scientifique et son cheminement, de la recherche à la décision. Au travers d’une dizaine d’interventions, cette journée a permis de dégager des pistes pour mieux appréhender les freins et leviers à l’élaboration, la prise en...

Species Distribution Models (SDMs) play a vital role in biodiversity research, conservation planning, and ecological niche modeling by predicting species distributions based on environmental conditions. The selection of predictors is crucial, strongly impacting both model accuracy and how well the predictions reflect ecological patterns. To ensure...

Background: Bird species identification and classification are crucial for biodiversity research, conservation initiatives, and ecological monitoring. However, conventional identification techniques used by biologists are time-consuming and susceptible to human error. The integration of deep learning models offers a promising alternative to automat...

Octocorals are sessile invertebrates that play a key role in marine habitats, with significant diversity in the Tropical Eastern Pacific, especially in Ecuador’s shallow waters. This study focuses on the most representative octocorals within the Marine Protected Area El Pelado, Santa Elena, Ecuador, as a part of a marine biodiscovery project employ...

Ecogeographical theory is a multidisciplinary framework that integrates ecological and geographical principles to understand the distribution, diversity, and adaptation of organisms across different environments. This theory emphasizes the significance of ecological niches at various organizational levels and the interplay between species and their...

Conservation and research of highly diverse plant taxa can be a considerable challenge due to unmanageable numbers of species with potentially complex relationships often resulting in difficulties in species identification. Cyrtandra, the largest genus of the family Gesneriaceae, exemplifies these challenges. The lack of identification resources fo...

Although advances in deep learning and aerial surveillance technology are improving wildlife conservation efforts, complex and erratic environmental conditions still pose a problem, requiring innovative solutions for cost-effective small animal detection. This work introduces DEAL-YOLO, a novel approach that improves small object detection in Unman...

NGS sequencing data are expanding exponentially, accompanied by a concomitant growth in non-target species contamination. Meanwhile, these seemingly undesirable sequences can actually provide valuable insights into the broad-scale diversity and distribution of their parasites or symbionts. In this study, we developed a pipeline called DBCscreen (DN...

This communication discusses the perennial gender disparity in science, focusing on the underrepresentation of women in research and leadership roles, particularly in specialized fields like Coleopterology. Significant barriers continue to hinder women's participation in scientific fields. The case of Dr. Analyn Anzano Cabras, a noted Filipino weev...

Understory is a key component of forest biodiversity. The structure of the forest stand and the horizontal composition of the canopy play a major role on the light regime of the understory, which in turn affects the abundance and the diversity of the understory plant community. Reliable assessments of canopy structural attributes are essential for...

Background The location and palaeoceanographic history of the Mediterranean Sea make it a biodiversity hotspot, prompting extensive studies in this region. However, despite the marine biodiversity of this area being apparently widely studied, a large amount of distributional data for Mediterranean taxa is still unpublished or scattered in various s...

Genetic technologies such as DNA barcoding make it easier and less expensive to monitor biodiversity and its associated ecosystem services, particularly in biodiversity hotspots where traditional assessments are challenging. Successful use of these data‐driven technologies, however, requires access to appropriate reference data. We reviewed the >37...

Biodiversity of sharks and rays in the Sultanate of Oman, with new records of rays Khalfan M. Alrashdi* Directorate General of Fisheries Research, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Water Resources, P.O.Box 427, P.C. 100, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. *Correspondence e-mail: khalfanrashdi@gmail.com Abstract: Over the last two decades, there has...

Crustacean zooplanktons are key secondary and tertiary producers in marine ecosystems, yet their genomic resources remain poorly understood. To advance biodiversity research on crustacean zooplankton, this study evaluated the effectiveness of genome skimming, a method that assembles genetic regions, including mitogenome, from shotgun genome sequenc...

Narrm‐Melbourne, Australia, has been at the forefront of urban biodiversity research, planning and management for 50 years in urban landscapes that have many endemic and threatened species and remnant ecosystems. Yet a range of emerging social and ecological challenges are emerging that must be addressed for Narrm‐Melbourne to continue to be a lead...

With the advancement of high-throughput, cost-effective sequencing, the application of genomic approaches to biodiversity research is becoming increasingly accessible and inclusive. As the availability of a reference genomes database is indispensable for genomics research, a recent pan-European effort - the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) -...

The 70th anniversary of the Estação Biológica de Boraceia (EBB) represents a significant milestone in Atlantic Forest conservation. Established by Decree‑law No. 23,198 on March 16, 1954, the reserve has become a key center for biodiversity research, supporting environmental monitoring, scientific training, and the production of new scientific know...

The fields of taxonomy and biodiversity research have witnessed an exponential growth in published literature. This vast corpus of articles holds information on the diverse biological traits of organisms and their ecologies. However, access to and extraction of relevant data from this extensive resource remain challenging. Advances in text and data...

This study uses morphometric and molecular analyses to explore the diversity of the Coccinellidae family in Swat District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. A total of 365 ladybird beetle specimens were collected from various tehsils, leading to the identification of ten species across nine genera, including Coccinella transversalis, Coccinella septemp...

Preservation of living fungi, particularly ex-type strains, constitutes a crucial phase in biodiversity research and molecular studies of fungi. The principal goal of any fungal culture collection is to sustain strains in a viable state while minimizing morphological, physiological, or genetic alterations–a matter of significant importance, especia...

Urban ecosystems represent heterogeneous environments with mosaics of natural, semi-natural and man-made habitats, with plenty of vascular plants including native and alien species. In-depth biodiversity research in urban areas might be time- and personnel-consuming. Therefore, we selected six habitat types within 30 towns in Slovakia (Central Euro...

Platygastrine wasps (Hymenoptera: Platygastridae) are parasitoids of gall midges (Diptera: Cecidomyiidae). They and their hosts are exceptionally abundant and speciose, with great relevance to agriculture and biodiversity research. Both groups are also "dark taxa, " whose species identification and ecological associations are obscured by a history...

This study expands knowledge on Lakshadweep’s sponge diversity, documenting a new species Scalarispongia androthensis n.sp. and four new regional records. These findings enhanceunderstanding of coral reef ecosystems and support future conservation and biodiversity research.

Earth observation satellites are collecting vast amounts of free and openly accessible data with immense potential to support environmental, economic, and social fields. As the availability of remotely sensed data increases, so do the methods for accessing and processing it. Many solutions exist for creating cloud‐free image composites from often c...

Colonial pelagic tunicates play a vital role in marine ecosystems, yet their distribution in the Levantine Basin remains poorly documented. This study presents the first confirmed records of Helicosalpa virgula (Vogt, 1854) (Thaliacea, Salpida) and the Giant Fire Salp Pyrostremma spinosum (Herdman, 1888) (Thaliacea, Pyrosomatida) in Lebanese waters...

Discovering, describing and cataloguing global species diversity remains a fundamental challenge both for biodiversity research and for the management and conservation of biodiversity. Among animals, the challenge is particularly acute within the arthropods, which comprise approximately 85% of all described animals, with approximately 1 million des...

Over 250 years ago Johann August Ephraim Goeze, a Protestant pastor from Quedlinburg, Germany, discovered the first tardigrade. The German physiologist and anatomist Carl August Sigismund Schultze (1795–1877) later named the first species Macrobiotus hufelandi C.A.S. Schultze, 1834, a designation that remains valid today. By the first third of the...

1. The private sector is increasingly aware of its dependence on biodiversity and the financial risks and opportunities involved. This has generated a lot of demand for investing in nature-positive solutions. There is an obvious and non-negotiable basis for such initiatives: biodiversity data. Without this data and the tools built from it, no actor...

By giving researchers information on animal behaviour, migration patterns, and species occurrence in natural settings, camera trapping has become a useful tool in biodiversity monitoring and wildlife conservation. The use of cutting-edge technologies like Regional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and ResNet models offers a potential way to automa...

Antarctica is one of Earth's most untouched, inhospitable, and poorly known regions. Although knowledge of its biodiversity has increased over recent decades, a diverse, wide‐ranging, and spatially explicit compilation of the biodiversity that inhabits Antarctica's permanently ice‐free areas is unavailable. This absence hinders both Antarctic biodi...

Online videos are a popular medium for science communication. These videos can be presented from many perspectives, including scientists sharing their own work or a third-party presenting research findings. A mixed between- and within-subjects experiment (n = 620) was conducted in the United States to assess the impact of narrative perspective on t...

Biodiversity is critical for maintaining ecological balance, particularly as urbanization continues to impact natural habitats. Birds, as key indicators of environmental health, provide valuable insights into local biodiversity, with their nesting patterns offering significant ecological data. This study aims to map and monitor the biodiversity of...

Accurate and up-to-date knowledge of population trends is essential for effective biodiversity conservation, as is assessing the impact of conservation measures designed to alter these trends. Estimating population trends is challenging, however, either due to altogether insufficient data or due to so-called noisy data that do not readily allow for...

The urgency to identify biodiversity and other research has made eDNA methods more popular in recent years. This article aims to provide an overview of the eDNA methods for marine biodiversity research. We used bibliometrics to analyze marine biodiversity research using eDNA methods articles in the last twenty years from 2006 to 2024 in the Scopus...

In recent years, numerous botanical survey projects have been conducted across China, with accurate taxonomic identification being the primary objective of biodiversity research. Within this context, we report the discovery of Polycarpon tetraphyllum (L.) L. (Caryophyllaceae) and Arabis stelleri DC. (Brassicaceae) in Fujian, marking new records for...

Human activities have caused rapid decline in biodiversity, with accelerating species extinction. Simultaneously, recent advancements in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems offer transformative potential for biodiversity research. Unmanned vehicles—such as drones, ground robots, and underwater robots—equipped with high-resolution sensors...

A alfabetização científica pressupõe uma problematização crítica dos conhecimentos, científicos ou não. Visa estimular a capacidade de interpretar fenômenos ao tempo que habilita o aluno à aplicação dos conhecimentos na resolução de problemas e tomada de decisão. O objetivo do presente trabalho foi desenvolver nos alunos a capacidade de leitura crí...

Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC) is an autonomous organization established to undertake agricultural research activities for increasing agricultural production and productivity by generating appropriate agro-technologies suitable to various agro-ecological zones in Nepal. Rice research is one of the priority research areas of NARC. In coo...

DNA barcoding using the ONP MinION will be employed to characterize the genetic profile of the Palawan bearcat (Arctictis binturong whitei). This study will be aimed to establish a reliable method for species identification using mitochondrial COI sequences. Samples were will be collected from various enclosures of Palawan Wildlife Rescue and Conse...

This exploratory paper presents a novel perspective on Natural History Museums (NHMs) through the lens of design research. It explores how recent advancements in design, including the emergence of Design Research Labs and the More-Than-Human Turn, can catalyse NHMs' transformation from static public spaces into vibrant centers for interdisciplinary...

The methane seeps on the Pacific margin of Costa Rica support extensive animal diversity and offer insights into deep-sea biogeography. During five expeditions between 2009 and 2019, we conducted intensive faunal sampling via 63 submersible dives to 11 localities at depths of 300–3600 m. Based on these expeditions and published literature, we compi...

A universal method of quantifying patterns of biodiversity on islands is the species-area relationship (SAR). SARs visualize the relationship between species richness (the number of species) and the area of the land mass on which they live. An extension of this visualization, the speciation-area relationship (SpAR), helps researchers determine tren...