Preprints
There are 2060 Preprints listed.
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Warm Temperate Southwestern Atlantic
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Warm Temperate Southwestern Atlantic is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Rio Grande and Southeastern Brazil. The mapped extent of mangroves in 2020 was 709.5 km2, representing 0.5% of the global mangrove area. The biota is characterized by three species of true mangroves, Rhizophora mangle, [...]
Genetic diversity is key to a nature-positive future
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
1. Nature-positive describes the concept of halting and then reversing the loss of biodiversity in a manner that is equitable to all, particularly indigenous peoples and local communities. 2. Genetic diversity is the foundational component of biodiversity, underpinning species and ecosystem diversity. Genetic diversity is vital to resilience and ecosystem services. While genetic diversity was [...]
Breaking Barriers: Dualistic Thinking in Religious and Social Contexts and its environmental impact
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Breaking Barriers: Dualistic Thinking in Religious and Social Contexts and its environmental impact explores the intricate relationship between dualistic thinking, influenced by religious and societal norms, and its role in perpetuating environmental degradation. Through an interdisciplinary analysis spanning history and philosophy, it investigates how entrenched dualistic frameworks, such [...]
Mitonuclear divergence predicts gradual speciation in animal hybrid zones
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
The core of speciation is the genetic incompatibilities underlying the evolution of reproductive isolation. Hybrid zones provide unique opportunities to unravel the evolutionary rate of reproductive isolation in the origin of species. The selection against hybrids accrues with increased genetic incompatibilities and drives the evolution of reproductive isolation in the face of gene flow. There [...]
Projected climate change scenarios spatially decouple desert EFN-ant mutualisms
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Aim: Climate change is changing species distributions globally, but predicting these impacts on assemblages and their spatial overlaps under future scenarios is an ongoing challenge. Here, we explore how climate change influences distributions among two mutualistic assemblages. Location: The Mojave and Colorado Deserts, California, United States Methods: We developed stacked species [...]
Genome of Melody: Applying bioinformatics to study the evolution of Gregorian chant
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures
Gregorian chant was a central musical tradition in Medieval Latin Europe and one of the expressions of its cultural unity: any Latin Christian liturgy, such as the weekly Sunday mass, would have involved Gregorian chant as a major part of the prescribed ritual. The Gregorian legend of chant melodies’ divine origin required the practitioners to conserve them, to the extent that this requirement [...]
estar: An R package to measure ecological stability
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Assessing ecological stability across populations or communities is a prime goal in biodiversity monitoring and conservation research. Quantifying stability is not trivial because its different aspects can be measured with various metrics. However, to date, no software enables measuring different stability metrics on ecological time-series data. 2. We present the estar R package that [...]
Repeated mitochondrial capture with limited genomic introgression in a lizard group
Published: 2025-02-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Mitochondrial introgression is common among animals and is often first identified through mitonuclear discordance — discrepancies between evolutionary relationships inferred from mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and nuclear DNA (nuDNA). Over recent decades, genomic data have also revealed extensive nuclear introgression in many animal groups, with implications for genetic and phenotypic diversity. [...]
Climate change intensifies plant-pollinator mismatch and increases secondary extinction risk for plants in northern latitudes
Published: 2025-02-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Climate change can lead to “secondary extinction risks” for plants owing to the decoupling of life-cycle events of plants and their pollinators (i.e., phenological mismatch). However, forecasting secondary extinction risk under future climate change remains challenging. We developed a new framework to quantify plants’ secondary extinction risk associated with phenological mismatch with bees using [...]
High-resolution habitat suitability maps for all widespread Italian breeding bird species
Published: 2025-02-18
Subjects: Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Tackling the current global biodiversity crisis requires spatially accurate biodiversity data to rapidly assess knowledge gaps and set conservation priorities. Obtaining accurate data across large spatial scales is often challenging, due to the massive logistical and economic requirements of large-scale surveys. Here, we provide high-resolution (0.81 to 81 km², depending on species ecology) [...]
A Julia toolkit for species distribution data
Published: 2025-02-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
(1) Species distribution modeling requires to handle varied types of data, and benefits from an integrated approach to programming. (2) We introduce SpeciesDistributionToolkit, a Julia package aiming to facilitate the production of species distribution models. It covers various steps of the data collection and analysis process, extending to the development of interfaces for integration of [...]
On the feasibility of nonadaptive, nonsequential abiogenesis
Published: 2025-02-18
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Computational Biology, Evolution, Molecular Biology, Molecular Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Systems Biology
The emergence of life from non-living matter remains one of the most profound unresolved questions in natural philosophy. Classical models derived from the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis assume a gradual (sequential), selective assembly of biological precursors. Yet, for more than a century, all experimental efforts in this direction have failed in their attempt to achieve material abiogenesis. May be [...]
Report on spatial sampling designs for long term biodiversity monitoring of soil biota
Published: 2025-02-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Soil biota are extremely diverse and spatially heterogeneous. Sampling strategies that target the soil biota through metabarcoding must incorporate existing ecological theory and explicitly consider technical constraints. This report synthesizes empirical research from large-scale projects (SpaceMic, PhytOakMeter) to evaluate how spatial sampling design—specifically sample extent, number, and [...]
Spectral biology across scales in changing environments
Published: 2025-02-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding ecosystem processes on our rapidly changing planet requires integration across spatial, temporal and biological scales. We propose that spectral biology, using tools that enable near- to far-range sensing by capturing the interaction of energy with matter across domains of the electromagnetic spectrum, will increasingly enable ecological insights across scales from cells to [...]
Assessing UAV direct-seeding for tropical forest restoration: carbon sequestration potential and cost efficiency
Published: 2025-02-14
Subjects: Forest Management, Life Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Introduction: Afforestation, Reforestation, and Revegetation (ARR) projects are key to global reforestation targets under frameworks like the Paris Agreement and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. However, manual planting remains labor-intensive and costly, limiting large-scale restoration. UAV-assisted direct seeding offers a scalable alternative, yet its carbon sequestration and [...]