Preprints
There are 2635 Preprints listed.
Biogeography of crop progenitors and wild plant resources in the terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene of West Asia, 14.7–8.3 ka
Published: 2025-10-17
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology
This paper presents the first continuous, spatially-explicit reconstructions of the palaeodistributions of 65 plant species found regularly in association with early agricultural archaeological sites in West Asia, including the progenitors of the first crops. We used machine learning to train an ecological niche model of each species based on its present-day distribution in relation to climate [...]
Navigating forest dieback and climate succession: Practical guidance for forest managers
Published: 2025-10-16
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Pathology, Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration
Australia’s forests and woodlands are entering a period of rapid ecological change, driven primarily by the impacts of climate change. The landscape is shifting from one of relative stability to one marked by uncertainty, novel threats, and complex interactions between climate, disturbance, and forest health. This means that forest managers must reconsider established approaches and assumptions [...]
A dominance-assimilated liability model for complex fitness traits
Published: 2025-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Opposing explanations for the evolution of dominance effects observed in genetic traits were first proposed by Fisher and Wright around a century ago. Over the last few decades, while Wright’s theory and extensions of it have reached the status of accepted paradigm, Fisher’s views have become widely disregarded. Here, a number of counterarguments are presented, including a modified version of his [...]
Rebuilding Diversity in the Anthropocene
Published: 2025-10-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Rapid changes driven by the Anthropocene—including shifts in climate, nutrients, habitats, and species composition—are causing severe biodiversity loss while creating new ecological opportunities. The balance between short-term ecological shifts in realized niches and long-term evolutionary changes in fundamental niches determines diversification. In the Anthropocene, however, this balance is [...]
Invasive mosquitofish become more aggressive in the presence of native pike young-of-year: implications for native predator recruitment
Published: 2025-10-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Invasive species often exhibit aggressive behaviour, boldness, and high foraging activity, which contribute to their establishment success and impact on native ecosystems. The mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki), one of the world’s most invasive fish species, is known for its aggressive nature, which threatens the survival of native species. Lake littoral zones, critical for juvenile fish [...]
The True Cost of the Chip: Connecting AI’s Unchecked Growth to Land Use, Water Rights, and Indigenous Sovereignty in Chile’s Lithium Triangle
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Business, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The exponential growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is driving an “AI Mineral Rush” for hardware materials like lithium, essential for data center batteries. However, lithium extraction imposes immense, often obscured, environmental and social costs. This paper investigates these externalities in Chile’s Salar de Atacama, a core region of the “Lithium Triangle.” We connect global AI demand to [...]
A Modern Reanalysis of McManus’ Genetic Model of Handedness
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We replicate and critically evaluate McManus’ (1985) single-locus genetic model of handedness, which remains influential in laterality research. Using the original familial and twin datasets, we reproduce McManus’ parameter estimates while correcting reporting errors and miscalculations. Our reproduction confirms that the model is reproducible but reveals sensitivity to dataset inconsistencies [...]
Highly conserved regulators of environmental sensing and adaptation drive domestication in gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata)
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Domestication in fish involves rapid and complex changes in life-history, physiology and behaviour under human-controlled conditions. In gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata), a species with a relatively recent domestication history, we used genome-wide population comparisons to show that domestication targets a core set of highly conserved regulators of environmental sensing mechanisms. Across [...]
Ecotoxicological perspectives of microplastics
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Plastic pollution has been in discussion from last few decades. However, in the recent days, microplastic (MP) contamination has become an additional issue of concern for ecotoxicologists as extensive research on MP toxicity revealed serious effects on the environment, chronically. Global data on the production and usage of plastic compounds, demonstrated a steady exponential increasing pattern [...]
Landscape heterogeneity moderates temporal changes in floral resource diversity
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Floral resource diversity supports pollination function and is increasingly threatened by global environmental change. Using long-term data on native insect-pollinated plants across 200 landscapes in southern Sweden, we assessed changes in taxonomic and functional diversity over 26 years in relation to land cover heterogeneity. Species richness declined significantly, while the three functional [...]
From pipeline to network: redefining scientific success
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
The traditional pipeline view of academia no longer reflects the reality of scientific careers. Reframing success as a network of paths recognizes excellence in its many forms, fostering a more inclusive, resilient, and socially engaged research culture.
Jurassic Park @ 35: Reflections on evolutionary genetics, de-extinction, and the science-society interface
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
On the 35th anniversary of the release of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, I reflect on both technical and cultural themes of the novel that resonate in the current moment. First, I offer a concise review of three evolutionary concepts—plasticity, pleiotropy, and epistasis—that complicate our efforts to engineer organisms with desirable phenotypes. I show how these ideas play out in the [...]
The relative roles of in situ diversification and lineage dispersal underlying diversity patterns at the assemblage level
Published: 2025-10-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Speciation, extinction, and dispersal are the historical processes influencing the spatial distribution of lineages and strongly influence diversity patterns. Here, we apply a recently developed methodological approach to quantify the relative legacies in situ diversification history (i.e. diversification occurring in the biogeographical region) and historical dispersal (inferred from ex-situ [...]
Understanding the socio-ecological system (SES) of Arctic Reindeer husbandry
Published: 2025-10-09
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Arctic reindeer husbandry is a socio-ecological system (SES) of vital regional significance that is naturally connected to the cultural heritage, spiritual identity, and food security of Indigenous peoples throughout the Circumpolar North. This review integrates the multifaceted challenges and adaptive strategies of this complex adaptive system (CAS), which is increasingly exposed to accelerating [...]
Beyond distribution: environmental justice challenges of Indigenous communities across the Circumpolar North
Published: 2025-10-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The Circumpolar North is warming at an unprecedented pace, accelerating entrenched environmental injustices against Indigenous peoples. Although the disproportionate distribution of these harms is paramount, in this review, we contend that an exclusive emphasis on distribution is analytically inadequate. An inclusive multidimensional framework of environmental justice has been introduced that [...]