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Preprints

There are 2526 Preprints listed.

Relational Thinking for Landscape Management and Conservation: can we really embrace a human/nature continuity?

Élie Pédarros, Juan Fernandez-Manjarres

Published: 2025-09-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies

It is increasingly recognized that the conservation of natural and degraded landscapes requires rethinking our relationships with nature by considering social-ecological complexity. Currently, managers are faced with a wealth of knowledge in landscape ecology, restoration ecology and related fields, that are all mobilized to solve management problems. However, many conceptual propositions fall [...]

What time is it? Interactions between trees and fossils

Tom Carruthers

Published: 2025-09-01
Subjects: Life Sciences

Molecular sequence data is not in itself informative about absolute evolutionary timescales. Fossils are therefore often analysed alongside molecular data in order to generate time-scaled reconstructions of the tree-of-life. Here, I analyse interactions between fossils and molecular based reconstructions of the tree-of-life, and explore the implications of these interactions for time-scaling the [...]

Irreversible evolution of plant mating system easily triggered by pollinator declines

Samson Acoca-Pidolle

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Life Sciences

Revealing the unknown world of the endangered Lear's macaw using GPS-tracking data: identification of critical habitats for conservation

Fernanda Riera Paschotto, Erica Pacífico, Thiago Filadelfo, et al.

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Understanding space use and home range is essential for the conservation planning of threatened species as it helps to assess the suitability, extent, and placement of conservation areas that are imperative for species survival and protection. The Endangered Lear’s macaw (Anodorhynchus leari), a highly mobile frugivore, feeding specialist and endemic to Brazil’s Caatinga dry forest, faces ongoing [...]

BPGA: an interactive Shiny application for basic population genetic analysis of genotype data

Joan Fibla

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Education, Genetics and Genomics, Higher Education, Life Sciences

Background: Population structure and ancestry inference are routine in human genetics, yet remain inconvenient for non-experts because canonical tools (PLINK, GCTA, ADMIXTURE) require command-line expertise and careful data management. Results: BPGA (Basic Population Genetic Analysis) is an open-source R/Shiny application that provides an interactive workflow for educational and exploratory [...]

Persefone.jl: Modelling Biodiversity in Dynamic Agricultural Landscapes

Daniel Vedder, Marco C. Matthies, Gabriel Díaz Iturry, et al.

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Agriculture, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Population Biology

Agricultural landscapes are highly dynamic, constantly changing in space and time due to the effects of farm management and environmental factors. To forecast the effects of changes in agricultural systems on biodiversity, we need to understand these landscape dynamics and how they impact different species. Here, we present Persefone.jl, an open-source process-based model of agricultural [...]

Mapping multiple dimensions of forest diversity using spaceborne spectroscopy

J. Antonio Guzmán Q., Jonathan A. Knott, Jesús Pinto-Ledezma, et al.

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences

Observing biodiversity across space and time is essential for advancing and verifying conservation efforts toward global biodiversity and sustainability goals. Spaceborne imaging spectroscopy has emerged as a revolutionary tool for quantifying and tracking forest diversity, yet its application at large spatial scales remains a central challenge. We develop a framework to map multiple dimensions [...]

An evolving view of character macroevolution

Carrie Tribble, Jesús Martínez-Gómez, Carl J. Rothfels, et al.

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Life Sciences

Phenotypes serve as the interface between organisms and their environments and are thus pivotal for comprehensive biological understanding. However, comparative analyses of species’ phenotypes must account for the non-independence of characters imposed by the branching pattern of macroevolution. Methods to account for this phylogenetic non-independence have historically been conceived of as their [...]

Lateralisation shapes spatial learning in lizards

Daniele Pellitteri-Rosa, Birgit Szabo, Andrea Gazzola

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Evolution, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Spatial memory is fundamental cognitive process that allows animals to navigate and interact with their environment effectively. While extensively studied in mammals and birds, the mechanisms underlying spatial cognition in reptiles remain less understood. In this study, we investigated spatial learning and the potential influence of behavioural lateralisation in the common wall lizard (Podarcis [...]

Challenges for small island developing states in meeting monitoring requirements of the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework

Philip JK McGowan, Anik Jarvis, Helena Jeffrey Brown, et al.

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Biodiversity

The Kunming Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity is an ambitious agreement to halt the decline in the world’s biodiversity by 2030 and restore nature by 2050. In order to measure progress towards the Framework’s Goals and Targets, a monitoring framework has been established and this includes 26 headline indicators and 71 questions [...]

High-resolution range mapping of mycorrhizal fungal species reveals systematic biases in their protection

Clara Qin, Sujai Kumar, Jinsu Elhance, et al.

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies

Mycorrhizal fungi are essential to ecosystem functioning but have been overlooked in conservation agendas due to data limitations and a historical focus on plants and animals. We present the first global, species-level assessment of the area-based conservation of mycorrhizal fungi. Using 16.5 million site-by-taxon presence–absence records, we created high-resolution range maps for 189 arbuscular [...]

Ecological Kinetics and Evolutionary Dynamics of Antibiotic Resistance in Complex Environments

Fernando Baquero, Teresa M Coque, Jeronimo Rodríguez-Beltrán, et al.

Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are common in the natural environment, including the microbiota of animal and human hosts. The local physical, chemical, and biological conditions of environmental patches and matrices vary in both qualitative and quantitative aspects. Often, these conditions diffuse in gradients, creating intersections that can either facilitate or inhibit the spread and evolution [...]

The myth of the metabolic baseline: how sleep-wake cycles undermine a foundational assumption in organismal biology

Helena Norman, Daphne Cortese, Amelia Munson, et al.

Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology

Basal and standard metabolic rates (BMR and SMR) are cornerstones of physiological ecology and are assumed to be relatively fixed intrinsic properties of organisms that represent the minimum energy required to sustain life. However, this assumption is conceptually flawed. Many core maintenance processes underlying SMR are temporally partitioned across sleep and wakefulness and are not [...]

Frequent shifts in pollination strategy are decoupled from diversification in the terrestrial orchids

Jamie B Thompson, Eric Robert Hagen, Elizabeth Anne Forward, et al.

Published: 2025-08-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

Pollinator attraction strategies are central to orchid reproductive biology and have long been hypothesised to accelerate speciation rates, particularly through specialised coevolutionary interactions. However, most macroevolutionary evidence comes from studies of individual genera or tribes, leaving broad-scale patterns unresolved. Here, we reconstruct the evolution of pollination strategy in [...]

Habitual tool use on monopolizable resources affects group cohesion

Zoë Goldsborough, Margaret Crofoot, Julián León, et al.

Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology

Tool-aided extractive foraging changes animals’ interactions with their environment by expanding access to novel and/or high-quality foods. If and how habitual reliance on tool use impacts animals’ social dynamics is less understood. If materials for tool use are monopolizable, tool use might increase intragroup competition. While higher intragroup competition encourages greater group spread, [...]

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