Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
ENCORE: the global infrastructure for screening business risks, dependencies and impacts on nature
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Biodiversity and ecosystem services provide the foundation on which the global economy, and by extension all businesses, depend. ENCORE (Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure) has established itself as a key reference for business and financial institution assessment of exposure to risk stemming from nature degradation. It has over 18,000 users, has been used in over 15 [...]
Heat-driven declines in Scots pine cone and seed quality contrast with long-term climate adjustment
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change can alter forest regeneration through effects on seed production, seed quality, and the structures that protect seeds, yet most evidence focuses on seed output alone. We used 15 years of cone and seed-quality data from 184 Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) populations to test whether climate effects extend beyond fecundity to reproductive traits that determine viable propagule supply. [...]
Assessing habitat associations of critically endangered big-headed turtles to support grassroots river conservation
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Modern wildlife conservation relies primarily on state-run protected areas and hunting regulations, whereas grassroots initiatives to protect ecosystems from various threats such as large-scale infrastructure development are underrecognized and receive limited scientific support. We studied critically endangered big-headed turtles (Platysternon megacephalum) to support a grassroots river [...]
Reproductive mode and the evolution of mutation rate
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
The mutation rate is a fundamental force in evolution, modulating patterns of genetic variation, adaptation, and genome evolution throughout the tree of life. As such, many attempts have been made to explain its variation across species. Currently, the dominant theory of mutation rate evolution is the drift-barrier hypothesis. However, although this framework has received wide support across [...]
Earth observation and causal inference in assessing protected area effectiveness
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Life Sciences, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Area-based conservation is a fundamental component of global conservation strategies, yet robust causal evidence on the long-term effectiveness of protected areas is still emerging. Alongside traditional field data collection methods, Earth observation offers cost-effective means of generating high-resolution, spatially extensive information, and its broader integration into conservation science [...]
The Origin of Genetic Heredity
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
The dominant view that genetic heredity arose in an RNA world stems from the ideas of Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel, who suggested that early nucleotide polymers could act as both phenotype and genotype and that the genetic code was shaped by a frozen accident. At around the same time, Carl Woese proposed a different model: that naturally occurring early translation was biased by weak [...]
From pixels to plants: linking remotely sensed habitat data to roe deer diet from DNA metabarcoding in Scottish forest landscapes
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Understanding how landscape characteristics influence herbivore diet selection is fundamental to predicting ecological impacts and developing effective wildlife management strategies. We linked remotely sensed habitat data and dietary DNA metabarcoding to test whether landcover classifications can explain variation in European roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) diet across Scottish forest landscapes. [...]
Seasonal warming and marine heatwaves shape thermal acclimation and growth of juvenile European plaice in a coastal nursery habitat
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Global climate change is driving ocean warming and exposing shallow coastal nursery habitats to increasingly frequent marine heatwaves. The European plaice (Pleuronectes platessa) is a flatfish that settles in shallow sandy bays of the Northeast Atlantic in spring and remains until late summer migration, experiencing peak seasonal temperatures during a critical period for juvenile growth. We [...]
Humans simplified trophic structures in island lake ecosystems
Published: 2026-09-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Lakes on oceanic islands are exceptionally vulnerable ecosystems and serve as natural archives of long-term environmental change, yet long-term reconstructions spanning multiple trophic levels remain rare. We reconstruct 2,000 years of ecological change across nine Azorean lakes by analysing sediment records of community composition and trophic-guild richness for aquatic producers and consumers, [...]
What’s in flower? Phenological temperature sensitivities in a restricted alpine flora
Published: 2026-09-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
As climate warming continues, cues for shifts in plant reproductive timing will be a key mediator of species success. To examine the links between temperature and flowering time in the Australian alpine, we used climate records and 18,000 flowering observations spanning 12 years for 52 alpine plant species from the Snowy Mountains, Australia. We modelled three phenological traits (flowering [...]
Why we need ecology and evolution for a better understanding of misdirected behaviour
Published: 2026-09-01
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Animal behaviour emerges from the complex interaction between internal states, as well as biotic and abiotic environmental conditions. When observed behavioural responses differ from researchers’ expectations, they are often described as “misdirected behaviour” and potentially maladaptive. However, several factors including genetic background and developmental conditions, sensory perception and [...]
Prevalence of Gastrointestinal Parasites in Goats and Sheep in Mbula Kuli, Adamawa State, Nigeria
Published: 2026-09-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Gastrointestinal (GI) parasitism is a major constraint to small ruminant productivity in Nigeria, causing reduced growth, weight loss, and economic losses to herders. This study assessed the prevalence of gastrointestinal parasites in goats and sheep in Mbula Kuli, Adamawa State, Nigeria, between 2025 and 2026. A total of 110 faecal samples (40 from goats and 70 from sheep) were collected and [...]
The effect of environmental change on plastic sex-ratio strategies
Published: 2026-09-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Offspring sex ratio manipulation has been widely studied, with numerous adaptive explanations proposed for biased sex ratios. While sex-ratio trends have been observed in many species, such patterns often disappear over time within populations or differ across populations. Environmental change is frequently proposed as underlying these inconsistencies, particularly for strategies relying on [...]
wildtag.ai: an open-access end-to-end offline AI-assisted desktop application for managing camera trap projects
Published: 2026-09-01
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Bioinformatics, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Camera traps generate massive volumes of data, yet their decision-support potential is diluted by the bottleneck of manual processing. Automated classification has largely solved this, but classification alone does not remove the barriers to adoption: it must be coupled with the means to turn predictions into a verified, shareable dataset, which no existing tool does end-to-end, offline, and [...]
Uptake of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in plants: A systematic review and meta-analysis research protocol
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) transfer from contaminated environments into plants, contributing to food chain accumulation and an exposure pathway central to human health risk assessment. Regulatory risk assessments commonly use plant bioconcentration factors (BCFs) to estimate dietary exposure and support the derivation of health-based guideline values, yet they have not been [...]