Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Unravelling drivers of forest biodiversity: Contrasting effects of mean environmental conditions, environmental heterogeneity and landscape context
Published: 2025-10-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Understanding how biodiversity varies under different environmental conditions is one of the central aims of ecology. Mean environmental conditions and heterogeneity have an effect on biodiversity. Increased heterogeneity is generally associated with increased diversity, but mean conditions tend to have a stronger influence. Conditions on site are embedded into a landscape context, which adds [...]
Unsung Songbirds: Advances in the Study of Corvid Communication
Published: 2025-10-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Historically, much research in animal communication has focused on the information content and ultimate function of vocalisations. These include defending territories, sounding the alarm, attracting mates, and advertising identity. The proximate mechanisms that shape signal production and perception—including cognitive processes and cultural transmission—have only recently started attracting [...]
Population and Evolutionary Genomics of Lizards and Snakes
Published: 2025-10-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
With an extraordinary diversity in body plans, colour patterns and lifestyles, and over 12,000 living species, squamate reptiles (lizards, snakes, and amphisbaenians) provide unparalleled opportunities to apply genomic tools for answering biological questions. From desert runners to rainforest climbers, high-mountain dwellers to sea snakes, squamates have repeatedly evolved remarkable [...]
The role of socially transferred materials in translating and mediating the effects of global change
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Almost all animal species transfer endogenously produced substances to conspecifics, either horizontally or vertically, through eggs, seminal fluid, milk, or other specialized materials. These socially transferred materials (STMs) can have substantial evolutionary consequences, are exceptionally plastic, and may enable organisms to adapt to environmental change. The world is facing rapid [...]
Faster growing and more functionally diverse: global change alters functional trait composition of mountain plant communities in the European Alps
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how global change reshapes mountain plant communities is essential for predicting biodiversity and ecosystem function in a warming world. Using resurvey data from over 1,400 alpine and subalpine vegetation plots across the European Alps, we show that community-weighted means of key functional traits – specific leaf area, leaf nitrogen, and seed mass – have increased significantly [...]
Automated insect monitoring with camera traps is transforming ecological understanding
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Addressing global declines in insect biodiversity requires both ecological restoration and high-quality monitoring data. While long-term participatory schemes have been foundational, recent advances in automated recording and AI-based identification offer transformative but undocumented potential. Here, we show how leveraging insect camera traps, deep learning models and statistics drives a [...]
Sexual stings in scorpions - knock-out drug or love potion?
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Life Sciences
Conspecific male to female envenomation, though rare, has been documented across venomous taxa. While traditionally interpreted as a coercive mating strategy to enhance male reproductive success and to avoid cannibalism, this explanation may not fully account for the behaviour in scorpions, which exhibit minor sexual size dimorphism and complex courtship rituals. This review explores the possibly [...]
Resolving Indirect Effects of Large Herbivores on Terrestrial Ecosystem Functioning
Published: 2025-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
The world’s large herbivores play outsized roles in shaping ecosystem processes like primary production, decomposition, and mineralization. Contemporary management of these animals is therefore poised to be a powerful tool for holistic ecosystem management. Yet we currently lack (i) adequate understanding of indirect interactions underlying herbivore control of ecosystem processes, especially [...]
Global offsetting of the outsourced biodiversity footprint of consumption
Published: 2025-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
International trade outsources environmental impacts of consumption through complex value chains causing biodiversity loss across Earth. There is a need to examine the negative biodiversity impacts and the opportunities to mitigate and offset the impacts, as a global systemic phenomenon. Traditional biodiversity offsetting is used to offset local land use impacts but no means to offset the [...]
Reflections on an essential but elusive ecological metaphor: The Hutchinsonian niche
Published: 2025-10-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Hutchinsonian niche, a pervasive metaphor in ecology, is a sister concept to Sewall Wright’s adaptive landscape, with a shared focus on fitness. Characterizing what fitness means (and how to measure it) is a fundamental conceptual issue in both evolutionary biology and ecology. After a brief overview of adaptive landscapes and issues with fitness, this essay contrasts G.E. Hutchinson’s [...]
SEICAT+: a comprehensive assessment framework for positive socio-economic impacts of alien species
Published: 2025-10-20
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Economics, Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Demography, Population, and Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Despite their recognized harms to humans and biodiversity, alien species outside of domestication/cultivation can also provide socio-economic benefits, which are essential to consider when identifying stakeholder conflicts and informing managers and policymakers. These benefits often result from the enhancement of ecosystem services, such as the provision of food, timber, and other natural [...]
Navigating forest dieback and climate succession: Practical guidance for forest managers
Published: 2025-10-16
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Pathology, Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration
Australia’s forests and woodlands are entering a period of rapid ecological change, driven primarily by the impacts of climate change. The landscape is shifting from one of relative stability to one marked by uncertainty, novel threats, and complex interactions between climate, disturbance, and forest health. This means that forest managers must reconsider established approaches and assumptions [...]
A dominance-assimilated liability model for complex fitness traits
Published: 2025-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Opposing explanations for the evolution of dominance effects observed in genetic traits were first proposed by Fisher and Wright around a century ago. Over the last few decades, while Wright’s theory and extensions of it have reached the status of accepted paradigm, Fisher’s views have become widely disregarded. Here, a number of counterarguments are presented, including a modified version of his [...]
Rebuilding Diversity in the Anthropocene
Published: 2025-10-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Rapid changes driven by the Anthropocene—including shifts in climate, nutrients, habitats, and species composition—are causing severe biodiversity loss while creating new ecological opportunities. The balance between short-term ecological shifts in realized niches and long-term evolutionary changes in fundamental niches determines diversification. In the Anthropocene, however, this balance is [...]
A Modern Reanalysis of McManus’ Genetic Model of Handedness
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We replicate and critically evaluate McManus’ (1985) single-locus genetic model of handedness, which remains influential in laterality research. Using the original familial and twin datasets, we reproduce McManus’ parameter estimates while correcting reporting errors and miscalculations. Our reproduction confirms that the model is reproducible but reveals sensitivity to dataset inconsistencies [...]