Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Overcoming limitations in selection guidelines for state-of-nature metrics in corporate assessments
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
The development and adoption of frameworks to help organisations understand, monitor, and disclose their biodiversity risks and impacts have accelerated due to Target 15 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Organisations are increasingly expected not only to measure their biodiversity pressures and responses, but also to demonstrate whether their actions lead to negative or [...]
Increase, decrease, or both: A systematic review of mosquito population response to floods
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Parasitic Diseases, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Virus Diseases
Floods are increasing in frequency and severity under the ongoing climate change and are widely reported to alter mosquito population dynamics. However, the direction, magnitude, and consistency of this effect across mosquito species and flood contexts remain poorly studied. This systematic review synthesizes empirical evidence on mosquito species population responses to disastrous flood events [...]
Five First Records from a Half-Century Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta) Communal Nesting Aggregation: Predation, Mortality, Nesting Phenology, and a Decade of Nest Protection
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
We describe a half-century communal nesting aggregation of the Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta), a species of conservation concern, at a single restored prairie–savanna site along a tributary of the Namekagon River in northwest Wisconsin, USA, monitored since the 1970s and protected with successive structures since 2015, and we report five natural-history findings from the site that are, to our [...]
Flexible Resource Use but Consistent Parental Care across Populations in a Nocturnal Raptor
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Parental investment is often quantified by how much food offspring receive, yet parental behaviour throughout the breeding phase and the timing and composition of resource delivery may be equally important. We tested this by integrating behaviour, diet and activity rhythms in two populations of tawny owl (Strix aluco) in northern Europe. Parental behaviour followed conserved temporal patterns [...]
A Priori Prediction of Population Growth of Parnassius smintheus.
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
A priori testing of a model, i.e., predicting an event before it happens, is the gold standard for model validation. This model testing approach steps up ecological modeling beyond simply explaining the past to proactive predictive modeling by challenging the ability of theories to make accurate forecasts before new data are collected, a litmus test of how well we understand the systems we study. [...]
Maternal traits and ecological conditions shape mother-offspring association in a capital breeding mammal
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Maternal investment is central to life history theory and population dynamics. However, variation in maternal behaviors mediating investment, and the drivers and consequences of such variation, remain poorly understood. Using 30 years of data from 565 northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris), we evaluated the intrinsic and extrinsic factors influencing mother-offspring association, [...]
Linking movement to mortality: a framework for predicting anthropogenic mortality hotspots in wide-ranging animals
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Human activities and their impacts are a major source of mortality for wide-ranging animals, yet conservation efforts often remain reactive because it is difficult to predict where mortality is most likely to occur. Approaches to understand and reduce wildlife mortality typically rely on coarse-scale associations between mortality events and landscape features, limiting their ability to identify [...]
Robust and realistic power analysis for cost-effective monitoring of occupancy trends
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Structured monitoring programs play a key role in identifying whether a population is declining, stable, or increasing, and power analyses allow program planners to determine the number of sampling units required to reliably estimate a specified trend (e.g., 1% annual decline) with a specified error rate (e.g., α=0.20, or 80% power). Increasingly, monitoring programs track trends in site [...]
Leveraging participatory science data to detect and quantify elevational range shifts in birds
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
One of the primary expectations—and observed consequences—of persistent warming temperatures is range shifts to higher elevations. However, the ability to detect and attribute climate-driven range shifts has historically been limited to rare locations with sufficient time-series data, which are especially rare outside temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Leveraging data from [...]
Contextual evidence for categorising interactions and guiding their discovery
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Ecological interactions shape community dynamics and stability, yet many go unrecorded. Link prediction methods attempt to tackle incomplete knowledge, but predictions are only conjectures, and validating them all in the field is neither feasible nor desirable. Furthermore, interactions differ in the action needed for their detection. Validation therefore must be guided by ecological and [...]
Heterogeneity in Nantucket Harbor: A Case Study in Spatial Variation, Temporal Exposure, and Coastal Habitat Assessment
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Nantucket Harbor has experienced substantial changes in water quality, together with losses of important biological resources that have long sustained the island. Both local and global effects have been linked to changes in nutrient concentration, water clarity, temperature and dissolved oxygen, which in turn have been associated with a decrease in eelgrass coverage and variation in bay scallop [...]
Computational classification of SOD2 protein in coral and symbiotic algae from public genomic and transcriptomic data
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
SOD2, or Manganese/Iron Superoxide Dismutase, plays a crucial role in maintaining cellular health across the tree of life. Existing literature is vague in identifying types of SOD2 proteins expressed in both corals and their symbiotic algae; most agree on the presence of a) mitochondrial targeting MnSOD in corals, and b) likely Mn dependent SOD2 in algae. This paper presents evidence for four [...]
Bryophyte community responses to long-term warming manipulations vary greatly between contrasting tundra habitats
Published: 2026-08-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Bryophytes are a diverse group of plants, both taxonomically and functionally. Although they are a major vegetation component in many tundra habitats and affect ecosystem function in various ways, they have not received full attention in studies on responses of tundra plant communities to climate warming. Here we compared bryophyte community structure, taxonomic composition, diversity and [...]
Wolf–Deer Camera-trap Detections Across Wisconsin’s Statewide Wolf Range (2018–2025): A Temporary Increase in Wolves Following Deer After the 2021 Wolf Harvest, Displacement Effects by Habitat Zone, and Avoidance of People Across Co-occurring Species
Published: 2026-08-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Two prior analyses of wolf-enriched extracts of the Snapshot Wisconsin camera network — one county, then five northwestern counties — showed that gray wolves (Canis lupus) tended to arrive at cameras shortly after white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), that they arrived after antlered bucks more often than the bucks’ numbers would predict, and that deer returned to a site more slowly after a [...]
Protecting confidential data when using AI coding assistants: A practical guide
Published: 2026-08-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) coding assistants can substantially accelerate research workflows in ecology, fisheries science, and related quantitative disciplines, but they also create new pathways for accidental or adversarial disclosure of confidential information. Researchers in these fields routinely work with legally protected and commercially sensitive records (e.g., [...]