Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Specimen preservation affects herbarium-derived leaf traits, reflectance spectra, and predictive models
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
• Herbaria are increasingly used as sources of functional trait data and reflectance spectra used in models for trait prediction and species classification. However, it is currently unknown how leaf preservation protocols may affect these data. • Using a factorial experimental design, we tested how alcohol preservation, drying intensity, and their interaction affected foliar traits (leaf mass per [...]
Daphniids avoid Utricularia on a horizontal plane
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Besides animal predators, carnivorous plants, such as the littoral bladderwort Utricularia vulgaris, also strongly impact cladoceran communities by efficiently capturing passing planktonic animals, including small daphniids, in their bladder traps. Therefore, we hypothesized these animals should avoid direct contact with these carnivorous plants. We measured the distance Ceriodaphnia and [...]
GRACE Resurvey of Central European Grassland Vegetation to study the Impacts of Country-Level Landscape Dynamics on Biodiversity
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Life Sciences
Grasslands harbor high species diversity and are strongly influenced by local management and land-use histories. In countries of Central Europe, these ecosystems were severely impacted by different agricultural policies on both sides of the former Iron Curtain in the second half of the 20th century,, reshaping grassland extent and habitat quality. These land-use changes turned border regions into [...]
Beyond single species seed orchards: A multi-species framework for tropical tree breeding and forest management
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Conventional forest tree breeding has largely focused on species that perform well in monoculture systems, where genetic evaluation, seed production, and management can be optimized under uniform conditions. While this approach has delivered substantial genetic gains, it does not adequately address the growing demand for forests that function as diverse, climate resilient ecosystems. Most [...]
Somatic evolution of metabolic reprograming: mutation limited or selection limited?
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Somatic mutations can potentially be responsible for metabolic reprogramming, but the crucial question is whether the evolution would be mutation limited or selection limited. Mathematical and statistical considerations make the case for selection limited evolution stronger, e.g. somatic evolution of cancer is shown to be selection limited than mutation limited. Although some insights are [...]
Wolf–Deer Movement After the 2021 Wolf Harvest, by North-South Gradient and Proximity to Towns using a Five-County Camera Record (2018–2025)
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Previous analysis of a wolf-enriched extract of the Snapshot Wisconsin camera network for five northwestern counties (Barron, Burnett, Bayfield, Douglas, and Sawyer; 525 cameras, 294,031 camera-days, 634,214 detections, 2018–2025; 1,856 wolf detections on 197 cameras) established patterns in the way gray wolves (Canis lupus) follow, select which class of deer to follow, and how strongly they [...]
A scalable multi-resolution framework for connectivity-based biodiversity indicators
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Landscape connectivity links local habitat condition to broader ecological processes including dispersal, recolonisation, range shifts, and species persistence, that underpin biodiversity responses to land-use and climate change. Several established biodiversity indicators — habitat connectedness (including as an input to the Biodiversity Habitat Index, BHI), Protected Area Connectedness Index [...]
Reconstructing the Early Evolution of Insect-Bacterial Mutualism through Natural Symbiotic Systems, Experimental Evolution, and Symbiosis Engineering
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
The evolutionary transition from free-living bacteria to mutualistic symbionts remains a central question in symbiosis research. Traditionally, this process has been inferred from comparative analyses of extant symbiotic systems, which provide evolutionary snapshots but offer limited insight into the processes connecting them. Recent studies of the stinkbug Plautia stali and its bacterial [...]
Leveraging Large Scale, Open-Access Population Data to Calculate Genetic Indicators: A Continental Assessment of European Birds
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) committed countries worldwide to conserving and restoring genetic diversity. Yet, translating complex genetic data into actionable metrics remains formidable for most stakeholders, especially when DNA-based data are unavailable. Proxy metrics such as the KMGBF headline indicator (A.4) using effective population size (Ne) and the [...]
Principles of Effective Guidance to Support the Implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework
Published: 2026-07-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Effective guidance is necessary for conservation practitioners to implement targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF). However, there is a need to determine what properties make good guidance: easily accessible, widely usable and addressing specific needs to be implemented quickly by end-users. Alongside a rapid review of tools and guidance resources (T&G) [...]
A modeling lens on landscapes-of-peril and other ecological drivers of zoonoses
Published: 2026-07-31
Subjects: Animal Diseases, Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences
Ecological systems are driven by a complex suite of environmental conditions, interactions among individuals, and reciprocal behavioral and biological responses of organisms to the ecosystems they inhabit. Individuals may, in turn, reshape those systems, generating feedback that alters the ecological drivers influencing subsequent system dynamics. Extractive and competitive processes are embedded [...]
Bridging the data gap in freshwater biodiversity conservation monitoring: global indicators and online data systems
Published: 2026-07-31
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Freshwater ecosystems are among the most threatened on Earth. Global efforts to conserve biodiversity through multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) explicitly include goals contributing to freshwater ecosystems, but monitoring their impact is often constrained by issues around data availability and access, affecting countries’ ability to plan conservation responses and apply adaptive [...]
Patterns of Gray Wolf and White-tailed Deer Movement: Local, County and Regional Camera-trap Data (2018-2025)
Published: 2026-07-31
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The gray wolf (Canis lupus) is the apex predator of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), but on a single restored site it can be too rare to study. A year-round survey of about ten cameras at nine fixed stations on an approximately 100-ha prairie–savanna complex located within Washburn County, Wisconsin, yielded too few wolf detections over three years (11,473 animal detections, 2024–2026) [...]
The Global Ecosystems Atlas: comprehensive and systematic mapping of Earth's ecosystems
Published: 2026-07-31
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geography, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Halting and reversing biodiversity loss is central to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, yet a lack of consistent, spatially comprehensive data on ecosystem distributions has undermined our ability to monitor progress against its goals and targets. Here we introduce the Global Ecosystems Atlas initiative, convened by the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO) in [...]
Age-related shifts in dietary and oviposition preferences and steep costs of modest parental ageing in Drosophila melanogaster
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Nutritional requirements vary across sexes and throughout an organism’s lifetime, and are predicted to influence dietary preferences to maximise fitness. However, the consequences of age-related changes in dietary preferences within and across generations are unknown. This is an important omission, as age-related changes in nutrient intake could have direct, sex-specific effects on offspring. We [...]