Preprints
There are 2847 Preprints listed.
The interplay between epigenetic mechanisms and deleterious mutations: implications for fitness, evolution and conservation
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics
Understanding the causal effects of genetic mutations is essential for explaining fitness variation, forecasting evolutionary trajectories and assessing extinction risk, yet remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in natural populations. While amino acid substitutions can alter protein structure and function, mutations affecting gene regulation can also have significant fitness [...]
Temperature carryover effect revealed for marine fishes using spatio-temporal distributed lag models
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Marine Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Understanding the impact of changing temperature on population densities is necessary to predict the likely impact of climate anomalies (e.g., marine heatwaves) or forecast distribution shifts under future climate scenarios. Population densities are often analyzed using spatio-temporal models (STMs), which typically predict densities based on local habitat conditions while also estimating latent [...]
Measuring Nature’s Contributions to People – what data do we have?
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
The concept of Nature’s Contributions to People, established by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, extends the ecosystem services approach by acknowledging the many perspectives and world views about human-nature relationships. Quantifying these relationships requires robust data and tools. Using existing databases and artificial [...]
Ecological examples of nonstationarity, nonlinearity, and statistical interactions in dynamic structural equation models
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecologists are adapting structural causal modelling for spatial, phylogenetic, and time-series analysis. However, ecological extensions of path analysis and structural equation models (SEM) typically assume that interactions (“path coefficients”) are stationary, linear, and additive, while ecological and evolutionary dynamics are often nonstationary, nonlinear, and include statistical [...]
Bridging Science and Policy: A Global Review of Socio-ecological Indicators Guiding Biodiversity Action
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Biology, Community-based Research, Environmental Monitoring, Human Ecology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Nature and Society Relations, Other Political Science, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
1. Biodiversity continues to decline despite a proliferation of indicators intended to inform conservation policy. We asked which socio-ecological indicators are actually reaching decision-makers, how they are used, and where critical gaps persist. 2. Following a scoping-review protocol and PRISMA workflow, we screened 906 documents in Web of Science and Scopus and analyzed 43 studies that [...]
Meat’s Role as a Staple Food and the Opportunity to Improve Dietary Patterns in America
Published: 2026-01-09
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences
Many Americans choose to eat meat, with beef and poultry being their top protein choices. The best available evidence indicates that most Americans consume meat in amounts at, or near, levels modeled in the 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. There is an opportunity, however, for many Americans to improve how they consume meat, including selecting leaner cuts and using healthful preparation [...]
Consensus on future research directions in the Phylum Rotifera
Published: 2026-01-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Rotifers play key roles in aquatic ecosystems, yet significant uncertainty remains about their diversity and evolution, and basic knowledge is still lacking to address practical challenges related to global change. To identify the major knowledge gaps hindering progress, we carried out a Delphi process both online and during the 17th International Rotifer Symposium, involving more than forty [...]
Data aggregation blurs inferred temporal trends in bird sampling
Published: 2026-01-09
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Ellis-Soto et al. (2023, Nat Hum Behav) reported that disparity in bird-sampling density between U.S. city neighbourhoods rated as safe versus risky for real estate investment (a practice known as “redlining”) increased by 35.6% between 2000 and 2020. We show that this reported trend arises from data aggregation and linear model misspecification. Using the original neighbourhood-level yearly data [...]
Wild boar population control needs more than recreational hunting
Published: 2026-01-09
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity
This perspective addresses the challenges of wild boar (Sus scrofa) population control in two different scenarios: reactive management to control disease epidemics and proactive management of wild boar populations at larger geographic scales. Intense but silent wild boar culling can significantly contribute to local outbreak control. Larger wild boar free buffer zones might work in front-like [...]
Methods for the integrated meta-analysis of mean and variation effects
Published: 2026-01-08
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
Meta-analyses in ecology and evolution typically focus on population means via effect sizes such as the log response ratio. Recently, there has been interest in quantifying effects on variability using the log variability ratio and the log coefficient of variation ratio. Until now, testing for the effects on group means and variabilities has necessitated two separate models. We present a workflow [...]
TABMON – real-time acoustic biodiversity monitoring across Europe
Published: 2026-01-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1. Ecological surveys are often fragmented, costly, and limited in scale, leading to large and long-standing knowledge gaps which threaten our ability to properly safeguard biodiversity. 2. Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) has promised to deliver automated biodiversity monitoring, but networks are rarely deployed on scales that can offer truly novel insights due to scalability and [...]
Active layer microbial inocula restore missing functions across thawed permafrost soils
Published: 2026-01-07
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Soil Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Microbial dynamics in thawing permafrost induce a climate feedback of uncertain magnitude. Estimates rely largely on incubations of experimentally-thawed permafrost soils, which may have limited microbial functionality after millennia of frost. In nature, however, seasonally-thawed active layer microorganisms may enter the underlying permafrost soil and introduce missing functions. Here we test [...]
Personality tips the scale: How individual differences in exploration shape behavioural and hormonal adjustment to different environments
Published: 2026-01-07
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Individuals show consistent differences in their behaviour across time and/or context, usually referred to as animal personality in behavioural ecology. These inter-individual differences raised the question if animals of different personalities also vary in how they adjust to certain environmental conditions. In the present study, we aimed to investigate personality-dependent adjustments to [...]
Spatial Expansion and Ecological Correlates of Invasive Crayfish Procambarus clarkii and Pacifastacus leniusculus in Mediterranean Rivers of Catalonia (NE Iberian Peninsula)
Published: 2026-01-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Invasive freshwater crayfish are among the most impactful non-native taxa in European river systems, yet quantitative assessments of their spatial expansion and environmental drivers remain scarce in Mediterranean regions. We investigated the expansion dynamics and environmental drivers of two invasive North American crayfish, Procambarus clarkii and Pacifastacus leniusculus, in rivers of [...]
Marine biodiversity indicators and online data knowledge systems
Published: 2026-01-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Marine Biology
Coastal marine ecosystems and biodiversity are changing rapidly under climate forcing, resource use, pollution and habitat modification. Monitoring these changes, and tracking progress across policy targets, remain constrained by uneven data coverage, fragmented observing networks and inconsistent measurement practices. International policy frameworks, most prominently the Kunming-Montreal Global [...]