Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Still Money for Nothing? Two Decades of Empirical Evaluation of Conservation Investments
Published: 2026-05-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Twenty years ago, the landmark paper “Money for Nothing?” argued that biodiversity conservation relied too little on empirical evidence. It called for more evaluations of conservation effectiveness based on explicit counterfactuals, comparing observed outcomes with those that would likely have occurred in the absence of intervention. To assess progress towards this goal, we systematically [...]
Disentangling the global drivers of species use and use-driven extinction risk
Published: 2026-05-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
The use and trade of wild species is a cornerstone of subsistence livelihoods and global economies. Understanding which drivers of use threaten species is critical in distinguishing between beneficial sustainable exploitation and harmful overexploitation, and ensuring that conservation efforts are targeted where they are most urgently needed. We provide the first nuanced global assessment of [...]
Reimagining Training for the Next Generation of Ecologists
Published: 2026-05-29
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
Rampant environmental degradation and biodiversity loss underscore an urgent need for ecological knowledge that can directly help address social‑environmental challenges. We argue that improved Earth stewardship needs ecologists to integrate foundational ecological knowledge to contextual understanding, relational practices, and engagement with decision‑making when proposing effective solutions. [...]
The ecologist’s guide to microclimate modelling and thermal biology in R
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Many ecological studies relate organismal responses to climate, but available datasets are often poor surrogates for the conditions experienced in nature. Microclimate models address this limitation by translating standard meteorological data into estimates of local temperature, humidity, and radiation at the scales relevant to organisms. Here, we provide a practical guide to mechanistic [...]
Inconsistent findings of ageing across different feather-quality indices in a wild passerine
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
In most animals, individuals tend to decline in performance in later life, known as ageing. In birds, studies of ageing have traditionally concentrated on metrics of survival and reproductive success, whereas morphological traits have received comparatively little attention. Feather quality is a key morphological trait for passerines as it contributes to flight performance, camouflage and [...]
Hidden role plasticity of the reproductive caste in a morphologically differentiated termite society
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Reproductive division of labor is the defining characteristic of eusocial insects, separating germline-like reproductives from soma-like workers. While most studies have focused on worker sterility, it is generally assumed that developing reproductives invest only in maturation, not in colony labor. Here we show that nymphs (pre-alates) in a highly structured termite society can contribute to [...]
Identifying social learning through peering: predictions and recommendations
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Many species exhibit the capacity for social learning. However, the importance of social learning for wild individuals’ daily lives and its role in the emergence of animal culture remains to be uncovered. As observing conspecifics may provide a relatively safe and efficient means of learning, visual species may use observational learning to acquire various types of information from others. [...]
Canopy closure re-establishes ants in young tree plantations, while low soil pH limits ant diversity
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Entomology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Tree species richness is known to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, but its effects across trophic levels during forest restoration remain insufficiently understood. In reforestation on complex terrain, habitat complexity may moderate the effect of canopy closure on animal community reassembly, a relationship further shaped by the abiotic environment. 2. Ants, as key functional [...]
Navigating Spatial Trade-offs in Restoration Planning: A Multi-Objective Optimization Framework Integrating Ecological Feasibility
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecosystem restoration requires decision-support tools capable of balancing ecological benefits under limited resources while explicitly accounting for the long-term likelihood of restoration success. Despite its recognized importance, ecological feasibility has rarely been formulated as an optimization objective in spatial planning, typically being treated only as a constraint or biophysical [...]
The effectiveness of overwintering Eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica) in cold-dry storage
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
In the northernmost part of the Eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) range, oyster farmers face challenges maintaining stock through freezing winters. To avoid leaving oysters exposed to variable field conditions, many farmers overwinter oysters outside of the water in cold-dry storage (CDS). Here, we sought to add to the limited but growing empirical research examining the effectiveness of CDS [...]
From Individuals to Networks: The Role of Variation in Plant-Pollinator Communities' Responses to Global Change
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
1. Plant–pollinator communities are critical for biodiversity, ecosystem function, and human well-being. Yet our ability to predict divergent species responses to environmental change, the risk of abrupt collapse, or the potential for recovery in plant-pollinator systems remains limited. 2. Here, we argue that individual variation within species may play a critical but underappreciated role in [...]
Bayesian adaptive design for citizen science data collection: Exploring tensions between data and design
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
1. Bayesian adaptive design can be applied in spatial settings where future survey locations need to be selected based on already available data. An important use case of adaptive design is the recommendation of locations for opportunistic, citizen science collection of species observation data, where some areas are already overrepresented and others are severely undersampled. 2. This work [...]
Inferring genomic landscapes with the integrative sequentially Markov coalescent (iSMC)
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Biology, Computational Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences
The integrative Sequentially Markovian Coalescent (iSMC) is an extension of the sequentially Markovian Coalescent (SMC) model allowing for parameter heterogeneity along the genome, such as recombination and mutation rates. Heterogeneous parameters follow an autocorrelation process that modulates the genealogical process, extending the hidden state space and adding as few as two extra parameters [...]
A viral mimic increases body temperature but does not affect mass or inflammation in a wild frugivorous bat
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences
The acute phase response is a component of innate immunity that helps fight infections. Understanding variation in this response is particularly critical in bats, which can be asymptomatic hosts of pathogens that cause disease in other animals. Although bats are most famously tolerant of viruses, research on the bat acute phase response has focused predominantly on bacterial antigens. To improve [...]
Precision Microbiome Stewardship: Moving Aquaculture from Transient Supplementation to Systemic Resilience
Published: 2026-05-26
Subjects: Life Sciences