Preprints
There are 2389 Preprints listed.
ON THE CONCEPT AND IMPLICATIONS OF GENETIC PURGING IN SMALL POPULATIONS
Published: 2025-07-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Genetic purging is increasingly considered a relevant factor in conservation genetics, as well as in evolutionary genetics. However, for a long time, it was de facto ignored when computing the expected evolution of population fitness under inbreeding (the inbreeding depression). More than a decade ago, I proposed a simple genetic analytical approximation to account for the consequences of genetic [...]
Tree Climbing for Research and Conservation: A Report on the 2nd Tree Climbing Workshop held at the University of Energy and Natural Resources, Sunyani, Ghana
Published: 2025-07-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
The second Tree Climbing Workshop, held from April 9–18, 2025 at the University of Energy and Natural Resources, Sunyani, Ghana, aimed to enhance canopy access and research capacity in West Africa. The workshop provided 11 participants from Ghana, Gabon, Guinea and Rwanda with skills in static and moving rope techniques, visual tree assessment, rescue rigging, and mounting scientific instruments [...]
A Unified Hypergraph- and SuperHyperGraph-Based Framework for Food Web Extension: From Classical Food Webs to SuperHyperWebs in Ecological Systems
Published: 2025-07-01
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Food Science, Life Sciences, Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Hypergraphs generalize graphs by allowing hyperedges to join any number of vertices, while superhypergraphs further extend this idea by layering iterated powersets to capture hierarchical, self-referential connections. A food web models an ecosystem as a directed graph whose nodes are species and whose edges represent predator–prey interactions. In this paper, we introduce two novel extensions of [...]
Bridging the scales: what can microbial ecologists learn from classic ecology?
Published: 2025-06-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Microbiology
The fields of ecology and microbiology have historically developed independently of one another, resulting in each having unique methods, terminology, and concepts. Microbial ecology aims to synthesise these perspectives, merging the molecular and reductionist strengths of the microbiologist with the systems-level viewpoint of the ecologist. However, unifying disciplines with independent [...]
Emerging tools to advance neuroethology in butterflies and moths
Published: 2025-06-30
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Entomology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Butterflies and moths have played historically important roles in developing our understanding of both ecology and evolutionary biology, and neuroethology. In both contexts, the diversity of behavioral strategies and specializations displayed by different Lepidoptera make them informative case studies. However, as in neuroscience more broadly, lepidopteran neuroethology has tended to focus on [...]
A call for phylogenetic context to understand geographic variation and host specificity in the parasitic copepod genus Salmincola
Published: 2025-06-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Freshwater parasitic copepods appear to exhibit great taxonomic diversity. However, little is known about gene flow between species or whether there is incongruence between morphological and phylogenetic species definitions. Additionally, little is known about what evolutionary factors may contribute to speciation across various lineages. The copepod genus Salmincola, which includes common [...]
Body condition as a shared response to environment in a commercially important demersal fish assemblage
Published: 2025-06-28
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Measures of an organism's weight at a given length are often considered reliable indicators of energy reserves or `condition', which can be related to fecundity and risk of mortality. Understanding the impact of environmental change on fish condition may therefore be critical for sustainable management of human activities in marine ecosystems. We investigated how changes in Canadian Pacific [...]
Non-lethal imaging and modeling approaches for estimating dry mass in aquatic larvae
Published: 2025-06-28
Subjects: Developmental Biology, Integrative Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Zoology
Body mass is crucial for scaling and comparing physiological rates. For example, dry body mass is important in determining an organism’s metabolic rate since it excludes metabolically inactive water weight. Obtaining repeated measurements of body mass throughout an individual’s lifetime is trivial. In contrast, we are normally able to obtain only a single estimate of dry body mass per individual [...]
Predator-prey interactions as drivers of cognitive evolution
Published: 2025-06-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite decades of research, how and why cognition varies between and within species remains hotly debated. Social interactions and environmental variability are the leading hypotheses for cognitive evolution, but these factors fail to account for large amounts of cognitive variation. Evidence is mounting that interactions between predators and prey are a key driver of cognition, but research on [...]
Unveiling the spatial link between geodiversity and biodiversity: a multi-taxon study in the South of France
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Context: Addressing global environmental challenges requires an integrative conservation approach that spans multiple taxonomic groups and trophic levels. The "Conserving Nature’s Stage" (CNS) strategy promotes the protection of geodiversity -abiotic heterogeneity of the Earth’s surface and subsurface- as an holistic metric for biodiversity and ecosystems conservation, yet its relationship with [...]
The role of osmorespiratory compromise in metabolism and hypoxia tolerance of a purportedly oxyconforming teleost
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology, Zoology
Fish must manage the competing demands of ion balance and gas exchange across the gills – a physiological tension known as the osmorespiratory compromise. In dynamic estuarine environments, the osmorespiratory compromise may be exacerbated by variable salinity and periods of hypoxia that demand high respiratory work. This study examined whether exposure to isosmotic conditions (9 ppt) lowers [...]
Democratizing 3D ecology: Mobile neural radiance field for scalable ecosystem mapping in change detection
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
High-resolution, three-dimensional monitoring is increasingly essential for capturing ecological dynamics, yet conventional approaches such as terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and photogrammetry remain limited by cost, accessibility, and technical barriers. Here, we introduce and evaluate the application of mobile neural radiance field (NeRF) methods for ecological research. Leveraging [...]
Demographic causes of the pesticide crash in the peregrine falcon
Published: 2025-06-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Population crashes in many avian predators during the 1950–70s, caused by organochlorine pesticides, belong to the most spectacular cases in the history of conservation and ecotoxicology. Negative effects of DDT on eggshell thickness, leading to egg breakage and declining productivity, are well-documented. In addition, cyclodiene pesticides such as Dieldrin were strongly suspected to contribute [...]
Hotspots, refuges, and rising risk: mapping tropical hunting pressure across space and time
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Hunting is a major driver of global extinctions, yet the spatial footprint and temporal trend of this pressure is lacking at global scale, limiting our ability to achieve international policy targets. Here, we present the first standardized global maps of hunting pressure across the tropics, based on a machine learning algorithm trained on 2,463 hunted and non-hunted tropical sites, spatially and [...]
Rethinking Stress Through an Ecological Genomic Lens: From Predatory Pressures to Modern Mismatch
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Stress, traditionally seen as a psychological issue with physiological conse- quences, is now viewed as part of an evolutionary continuum. While modern stressors have shifted from immediate threats to chronic psychosocial chal- lenges, our physiological responses remain the same. In contrast, stress in the wild is acute; today’s chronic stressors keep the body in a prolonged fight- or-flight [...]