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Preprints

There are 2301 Preprints listed.

Borealization of tundra ecosystems with climate and land-use change

Mariana Verdonen, Isabel C Barrio, Laura Barbero-Palacios, et al.

Published: 2025-05-24
Subjects: Life Sciences

As the colder regions of the planet warm, species are moving northward and upward from the boreal forest to the tundra biome, a process that has been referred to as borealization. Here, we examine the diverse uses of the term borealization and propose the concept of tundra borealization for terrestrial environments to specifically describe shifts in species composition from boreal to tundra [...]

Decoding Genomic Landscapes of Introgression

Xin Huang, Josef Hackl, Martin Kuhlwilm

Published: 2025-05-24
Subjects: Life Sciences

Genomic landscapes of introgression provide valuable information for how different evolutionary processes interact and leave signatures in genomes. The recent expansion of genomic datasets across diverse taxa, together with advances in methodological development, has created new opportunities to investigate the impact of introgression along individual genomes in various clades, making the precise [...]

Neighborhood habitat gains increase plant species richness in forest fragments

Kyle Rosenblad, Jon Sullivan

Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Life Sciences

Theory and indirect evidence suggest that when new habitat is added to a habitat fragment’s local landscape, or “neighborhood”, species richness in the fragment will increase. Although this hypothesis is frequently assumed, it has not yet been tested directly with longitudinal data. In a natural forest regeneration experiment on Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island, we use causal inference to show [...]

Minimum Sampling, Maximum Insight: Tracking Environmental Trends in a Tidal Estuary

Barbara Spiecker, Kalle Matso, Christopher Whitney, et al.

Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management

Long-term environmental monitoring is essential for detecting ecological trends and managing dynamic systems. In estuarine environments, where monitoring is often constrained by cost and logistics, efficient resource allocation is key to sustaining effective programs. We developed a framework to optimize spatial and temporal sampling in the Great Bay Estuary (New Hampshire/Maine, USA), [...]

Ocean warming drives abrupt declines in fish productivity at global scale

Mathieu Pélissié, Vincent Devictor, Olaf Jensen, et al.

Published: 2025-05-22
Subjects: Life Sciences

Marine life is under multiple pressures, including climate change and overfishing. Environmental change and variability can threaten fishery sustainability, especially when it results in large, abrupt and persistent shifts in productivity of fish stocks. Reports of abrupt shifts in marine systems are not uncommon, but a global assessment of their occurrence and drivers is seriously lacking. Here, [...]

IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. Sandy Beaches & Dunes of the Gulf of Guinea North

Kwasi Appeaning Addo, Selasi Y. Avornyo, Philip-Neri Jayson-Quashigah, et al.

Published: 2025-05-22
Subjects: Life Sciences

The sandy beaches and dunes of the Gulf of Guinea North is a regional ecosystem subgroup along the West African coast. It had a mapped extent of 256 km² in 2022, with a width ranging from of 0.01 km to 1.02 km, and stretches over approximately 2481 km. This ecosystem subgroup extends along the shores of Benin, Togo, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Guinea Bissau. This [...]

IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. Sandy Beaches & Dunes of the West African Transition

Kwasi Appeaning Addo, Philip-Neri Jayson-Quashigah, Selasi Y. Avornyo, et al.

Published: 2025-05-22
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Abstract The ‘Sandy Beaches and Dunes of the West African Transition’ form a regional ecosystem subgroup along the West African coast. It had a mapped extent of 584 km² in 2022, with a width ranging from 0.012 km to 4.796 km, and stretching over approximately 1321 km. This ecosystem subgroup extends along the shores of Mauritania, The Gambia and Senegal. This ecosystem frequently experiences [...]

Revisiting the copepod diversity of Indian Sundarbans through estimation of carcasses

Debarati Sengupta, Danilo Calliari, Sourav Paul

Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Life Sciences

Diversity assessment of plankton traditionally considers species richness and abundance, overlooking the vital state of individuals (i.e., alive or dead). This study aimed to integrate the vital state of zooplankters into diversity indices, using the copepods of the Indian Sundarbans (IS) as an example community. It was hypothesized that when carcasses estimation (CE) is incorporated diversity [...]

Filling Monitoring Gaps for Data-deficient Species Using Annual Occupancy Predictions from Co-occurrence Models

Hyun Yong Chung, Dae Kyung Lee, John Losey

Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences

Fragmented surveys and limited monitoring exclude most invertebrate species from conservation policy. We present a framework that generates annual occupancy predictions using species distribution models (SDMs) to reconstruct missing trends—not to extrapolate trends, but to fill them in (the fill-in approach). Instead of filtering poor-data regions and years or relying on static environmental [...]

Toward Ecological Forecasting of West Nile Virus in Florida: Insights from Two Decades of Surveillance

Joseph Alex Baecher, V A Askshay, Robert Guralnick, et al.

Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Models, Virus Diseases

West Nile Virus (WNV) is the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the United States, yet transmission activity remains difficult to predict. This study used 20 years of digitized WNV seroconversion data from 526 sentinel chicken coops across Florida to develop spatiotemporal models with landscape and climate variables to predict WNV seroconversion at monthly and seasonal timescales. We [...]

NextGeneration specimen digitization: The international herbarium community goes spectral!

Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Dawson M White, Natalie Iwanycki Ahlstrand, et al.

Published: 2025-05-20
Subjects: Life Sciences

1. Spectral reflectance measured from herbarium specimens represents a vast source of plant phenotypic and functional trait data. 2. The potential to capture data from specimens to enhance knowledge of plant function and taxon identification has inspired many laboratories worldwide to initiate next-generation spectral digitization from specimens. 3. Combining these datasets into a coordinated [...]

Multimodal data integration to model, predict, and understand changes in plant biodiversity: a systematic review

Emilce Soledad Matinez, Eva Luz Tejada-Gutiérrez, Albert Sorribas, et al.

Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Life Sciences

The integration of multimodal data to analyze, model, and predict changes in plant biodiversity is critical for addressing global conservation challenges. This systematic review examines the current landscape of plant biodiversity data, focusing on the identification, classification, and evaluation of key open-access data sources and integration methodologies. We highlight the strengths and [...]

Nestbox use is linked to increased paternity loss in infected blue tits, but not great tits

Irene Di Lecce, Joanna Sudyka, Marta Szulkin, et al.

Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Life Sciences

Host-parasite interactions and reproductive strategies are critical aspects of avian life history, yet knowledge of their interplay in the context of nesting site microhabitat, in particular between natural and artificial nesting sites, is lacking. The choice of nesting site is critical for successful breeding, by ensuring protection from predators and a suitable environment for incubation and [...]

Disordered systems in community ecology: a tutorial

Matthieu Barbier

Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics

A basic fact of community ecology is that most ecosystems are comprised of many species and processes. Mathematical models trying to capture these ingredients and explain empirical phenomena usually face the problem of having vast numbers of unknown parameters and uncertain assumptions. It is not obvious when such mathematical models can truly be quantitatively predictive, or even conceptually [...]

Oxygen supersaturation has negligible effects on warming tolerance in aquatic ectotherms

Graham D Raby, Jeremy De Bonville, Leroy Reynolds, et al.

Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology

Under the midday sun when photosynthesizers are producing oxygen, shallow aquatic ecosystems can become supersaturated with oxygen (>100% air saturation) while they simultaneously peak in water temperature. It has been suggested that oxygen supersaturation could protect water-breathing animals from mortality during heatwaves because of the potential role of oxygen in governing thermal [...]

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