Skip to main content

Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences

Unravelling drivers of forest biodiversity: Contrasting effects of mean environmental conditions, environmental heterogeneity and landscape context

Gita Benadi, Julian Frey, Carlos Miguel Landivar Albis, et al.

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

Claudia Wascher, Vittorio Baglione, Thomas Bugnyar, et al.

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

Nathalie Feiner, Natalia Zajac, Guannan Wen, et al.

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

Yuqi Reitsema-Wang, Aileen Berasategui, Joris Koene, et al.

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

Sergey Rosbakh, Sabine Rumpf, Stefan Dullinger

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

Mark Andrew Kusk Gillespie, Kim Bjerge, Jamie Alison, et al.

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?

Yuqi Reitsema-Wang, Yuri Simone, Volker Herzig, et al.

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

G. Adam Meyer, Shawn J. Leroux

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

Hanna Kalliolevo, Sami El Geneidy, Janne Kotiaho

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

Robert D, Holt

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

Giovanni Vimercati, Anna Frances Probert, Sabrina Kumschick, et al.

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

Callum Bryant

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

Shobbir Hussain

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

Christian Voolstra, Ruben Hermann, Alexander Keller, et al.

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

Tomer Oron, Rony Karstadt, Yoav Ram

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 [...]

search

You can search by:

  • Title
  • Keywords
  • Author Name
  • Author Affiliation