Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
From metrics to meaning: diversity as an essentially contested concept
Published: 2025-12-25
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences
Biodiversity is among ecology’s most widely invoked but least consistently defined concepts. Despite decades of theoretical and methodological developments, ecologists continue to disagree about what "diversity" measures and how it should be quantified. These disagreements have direct consequences to conservation science, policy making, and public engagement. We argue that this enduring debate is [...]
The Effect of Increased Nutrient Availability on Freshwater Phytoplankton Growth
Published: 2025-12-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
This study examines the impact of nutrient enrichment on phytoplankton biomass and water chemistry in pond water samples. Three concentrations of organic fish fertilizer (0 µL, 10 µL, and 20 µL per 10 mL of pond water) were tested over 18 days under constant illumination. Phytoplankton biomass was spectrophotometrically measured at 750 nm, with pH and turbidity also assessed to evaluate changes [...]
Dorsal Fin Edge Proportions and Their Relationship to Swimming Strategy in Sharks
Published: 2025-12-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Dorsal fins play a critical role in elasmobranch locomotion by providing stability, reducing roll, and enhancing swimming efficiency. Variation in dorsal fin geometry may therefore reflect ecological niche and swimming strategy. This study quantitatively compares dorsal fin leading-to-lagging edge ratios in three shark species with differing ecological roles: the spiny dogfish (Squalus [...]
Reframing Population Genetic Structure as a Quantum Optimization Problem
Published: 2025-12-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Population genetic structure is commonly inferred using statistical and ordination-based methods that emphasize variance partitioning or likelihood-based clustering. While powerful, these approaches may undersample the full space of possible population partitions, particularly in systems characterized by weak genetic differentiation and high connectivity. Here, I present a proof-of-concept [...]
An analysis of passerine egg traits across the city mosaic: Urbanisation does not affect egg size and pigmentation patterns
Published: 2025-12-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
1. Rapid urbanisation provides remarkable opportunities to study how sudden, extreme changes impact wildlife. Compared to natural areas, cities are characterised by factors affecting both abiotic (e.g. climate, pollution, habitat fragmentation) and biotic (e.g. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), species composition, phenology) components of the ecosystem, ultimately changing the [...]
Towards a quantitative view of the NLR gene family 4evolution in the genome space
Published: 2025-12-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Plants and their pathogens coevolve over long time periods, and the history of coevolution is recorded in plant genes that confer pathogen resistance. Many of these code for Nucleotide-binding Leucine rich Repeat proteins (NLRs), which are crucial for distinguishing friends from foes and triggering potent defense responses. Advances in the ability to sequence genomes from many different species [...]
Soil Effects on Vegetation Dynamics Under Climate Change
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
While predictive models of contemporary vegetation change often emphasize climate as the main driver, soil properties are increasingly recognized as critical mediators. This review synthesizes evidence on climate-soil interactions from diverse fields (e.g., paleobiology, species distribution modelling, and plant-soil feedbacks) across multiple scales. We propose a framework capturing how [...]
The Singularity at the Heart of Evolutionary Biology: Organismal Selection and the Thermodynamic Origin of Life
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The origin of the first organism presents as a fundamental discontinuity in evolutionary biology. While population‑centred theories of natural selection succeed when reproduction and heredity exist, they cannot explain life’s emergence from non‑living matter. Building on the conceptual framework of Organismal Selection, this work proposes a physical model in which the transition from lifeless [...]
A plain language review and guidance for modeling animal habitat-selection
Published: 2025-12-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Animal habitat selection is the process of how individual organisms disproportionately use habitat compared to what is available to them. Understanding habitat selection is important for the study of ecology and conservation. However, learning the foundations of making inference or prediction on animal habitat selection can be quite challenging. Foremost, the literature is large and highly [...]
Escaping the net: Assessing midwater gear selectivity for the Joint United States and Canada Integrated Ecosystem and Pacific hake (Merluccius productus) Acoustic-Trawl survey
Published: 2025-12-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Acoustic-trawl surveys use trawl catches to validate the species and size composition of fish aggregations detected acoustically. However, certain sizes of fish may be more likely to escape some trawls, which can bias the size and age distribution of the catch used to estimate biomass. To quantify size-selectivity, we studied 3 midwater trawls used for the United States and Canada joint survey of [...]
Moving Target(s): One Health at changing human-livestock-wildlife interfaces in tropical ecosystems
Published: 2025-12-18
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Food Science, Life Sciences, Systems Biology
One Health approaches currently conceptualized for Western landscapes require fundamental rethinking for tropics, where human-livestock-wildlife interfaces exist as variegated mosaics rather than discrete zones. This overview examines why tropical ecosystems involve (i) Human mobility patterns shifting continuously through rural-urban migration and globalization (ii) Livestock health [...]
Reanalysis of “Historical redlining is associated with increasing geographical disparities in bird biodiversity sampling in the United States”
Published: 2025-12-18
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Ellis-Soto et al. (2023, Nature Human Behaviour) investigated whether the density and completeness of bird biodiversity sampling from citizen science observations across US cities covary with 1930s neighbourhood classifications based on perceived mortgage investment risk, a practice known as “redlining”. They claimed that worst-rated neighbourhoods were the most under-sampled urban areas for bird [...]
Living on the edge: ecological and evolutionary dynamics along invasion fronts
Published: 2025-12-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Invasion fronts are the edges of non-native species’ ranges and represent dynamic, non-equilibrium boundaries where colonization, ecological interactions, and rapid evolutionary processes converge. Although biological invasions are increasingly well studied, mechanisms operating at these advancing margins remain conceptually fragmented despite their disproportionate influence on spread dynamics, [...]
Nest construction behaviour, including the repair and re-use of a depredated nest, in the Variegated Fairy-wren (Malurus lamberti)
Published: 2025-12-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Documenting the diversity of nest construction behaviours is essential for understanding a species’ life-history. The Variegated Fairy-wren Malurus lamberti is a socially complex species whose nest building habits remain poorly described. Here, we report three nest construction behaviors that were observed during the 2024 breeding season at our study site in south-east Queensland, which have not [...]
Scale mismatches limit the efficacy of customary management
Published: 2025-12-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Indigenous lands are some of the most biodiverse areas in the world, providing protection for many species and spillover benefits for wider communities. However, these areas face increasing threats. Indigenous communities face many challenges in protecting and managing these lands, particularly in the form of power imbalances and spatial, temporal, and functional-conceptual mismatches. 2. [...]