Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
The collapse of environmental predictability erodes reproductive success in a Tropical seabird
Published: 2026-03-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change can alter not only when seasonal events occur on average, but also how predictable they are from year to year. Many long-lived seabirds show a paradox: breeding dates remain stable even as populations decline. Using two decades of data from Blue-footed Boobies (Sula nebouxii), we tested whether loss of environmental predictability could reduce reproductive success even when mean [...]
Historical subtidal regime shifts echoed in adjacent intertidal community
Published: 2026-03-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Anthropogenic stressors can trigger regime shifts, causing ecosystems to reorganize into new states. Moreover, there is growing evidence of the importance of fluxes (e.g., energy, matter and nutrients) in linking adjacent systems, suggesting that regime shifts within one system may extend to neighbouring systems through cross-ecosystem interactions. However, empirical evidence supporting this [...]
Integration of ecological knowledge in European landscape architecture: a systematic project-description review
Published: 2026-03-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Urban Studies and Planning
Landscape architecture has a strong environmental focus and clearly states the ambition to integrate ecological knowledge in its practice and theory. This study aims to assess the state of the art in integrating ecology in landscape architecture project design, identifying well-integrated ecological knowledge areas and potential knowledge gaps, to support future development of this integration. [...]
Predicting decay in functional diversity in plant communities under future climates
Published: 2026-03-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is expected to cause widespread shifts in the composition of plant communities. However, the extent to which these changes will alter the composition and diversity of plant functional traits is less clear. Here, we assess how climate change may reshape the functional diversity of 32,996 plant communities by combining data on their traits and realised climatic niches with future [...]
How environmental conditions affect the acquisition, establishment, and persistence of microbial endosymbiosis in insects
Published: 2026-03-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Microbiology
Long-term interactions between insect hosts and their internal microbial symbionts are ubiquitous. As these interactions support many aspects of the insect host biology, restrictions to their establishment and maintenance could have important consequences to the survival of insects and functioning of ecosystems. The current literature provides extensive evidence that rapidly changing [...]
Species, geography, and weather conditions predict offshore migration in songbirds
Published: 2026-03-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The increasing development of offshore wind farms raises concerns about potential effects on migratory songbirds. Current wind farm monitoring techniques, such as radar, infrared cameras and motion detectors, capture this risk in general, but cannot reliably identify individuals to species level and thus fail to detect species-specific exposure to these structures. Due to their spatial focus on [...]
A guide for integration of community ecology in landscape architecture: The Ecological Filters Framework
Published: 2026-03-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Urban Studies and Planning
The accelerating biodiversity crisis, driven by habitat change and urbanization, underscores the need to integrate ecological knowledge and landscape architecture. This paper introduces the Ecological Filter Framework (EFF), as a tool to foster this integration. By structuring complex ecological knowledge into tangible categories, the EFF is meant to empower practitioners to shape environments [...]
Average, variability, and extremes: A framework to quantify microclimate temperature modulation
Published: 2026-03-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Microclimate, the climatic conditions experienced by organisms, can differ substantially from the macroclimate measured by weather stations. Microclimate modulation is the modification of the microclimate by environmental conditions. Despite its ecological importance, there is currently no standardized method for quantifying microclimate modulation, which limits comparability across studies. [...]
Spatio-temporal shifts driven by climate change threaten persistence and resilience of honey bee populations
Published: 2026-03-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how climate shapes intraspecific genetic turnover is critical for predicting biodiversity responses to global change, yet such analyses remain limited for systems where natural adaptation and human-mediated dispersal jointly structure diversity. Here, we investigate the spatio-temporal dynamics of genetic composition in the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) across Anatolia and [...]
Bees as Ambassadors for Plant Conservation
Published: 2026-03-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Because of their abundance and sessile nature, plants often blend into the landscape, which can lead many people to be unaware of, uniformed, or uninterested in them. This phenomenon, known as “Plant Awareness Disparity” (PAD), contributes to a lack of support for the conservation of plants relative to animals. Strategies for mitigating PAD across diverse demographic groups remain poorly [...]
Flukes of resilience: new sightings of Atlantic humpback dolphin Sousa teuszii (Kükenthal, 1892), but bycaught bottlenose dolphins Tursiops truncatus (Montagu, 1821) in Benin
Published: 2026-03-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
The updated number of confirmed Atlantic humpback dolphin Sousa teuszii case records for Benin’s coast (period 2013-2025) amounts to six, including five sightings and one live-stranding. If no re-sightings occurred, maximally 22 individuals were involved. However, the two 2025 sightings may have been the same pod. Group size was small (mean= 4.57; SD= 2.37; median= 5; range= 1–7; n= 6) compared [...]
Toward a participatory and adaptive ecology of biodiversity conservation
Published: 2026-03-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Conservation biology emphasizes, with good reason, the harmful impacts of human activity but often extends the same antagonism to novel, potentially beneficial biodiversity that also arises through human involvement. This asymmetry is rooted in a pervasive nature/culture dualism that affords ecological value primarily to processes considered “natural.” Such a framing constrains conservation’s [...]
Long-term annual seed production data of individual European beech (Fagus sylvatica) trees in the Netherlands
Published: 2026-03-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Seed production of European beech (Fagus sylvatica) is highly variable between years and synchronised between individual trees (i.e., masting), creating years with high seed crops, separated by one or more years with little or no seed production. This pulsed reproduction has selective benefits for the trees, as it creates a cycle of predator satiation and starvation, and this way masting drives [...]
Masting breakdown in European beech reduces fitness benefits of masting, partly explained by climate change
Published: 2026-03-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Masting, which corresponds to highly synchronized but temporally variable seed production, is initiated by weather cues and is thus highly sensitive to climate change. Changes in these cues can lead to a masting breakdown, resulting in a reduction of the fitness benefits of masting through decreasing pollination efficiency and increasing predation risk for seeds. 2. Here, for the first time, [...]
Socio-sexual cues shape female diet choice in Drosophila melanogaster
Published: 2026-03-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Male harassment can disturb female feeding behaviour and limit females’ access to preferred foraging locations. However, it is not yet known how females trade off costs of sexual harassment or increased intrasexual competition against preference for dietary macronutrients when making foraging decisions. We used the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to investigate how female foraging decisions [...]