Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Island species as models for small population biology and conservation
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Islands provide unparalleled natural laboratories for understanding how small, isolated populations persist and evolve. Our synthesis of island population studies reveals that 50–70% report effective population sizes below 100, yet many taxa have sustained such small populations for millions of years. Strikingly, only 4% and 27% of studies examined genetic load and genomic diversity, exposing [...]
Towards ecologically meaningful foundation models
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ecology aims to explain and predict how organisms interact with each other and their environments across space and time. Yet both ecological data and theory are fragmented, leading to models that generalise poorly beyond specific systems or scales. Empirical evidence spans diverse modalities, resolutions and contexts, while theory is distributed across partially overlapping frameworks that are [...]
Thermal filtering reveals a cryptic reservoir of thermotolerant yeasts in Sub-Antarctic soils
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Global climate change is accelerating ecological transformation in Sub-Antarctic ecosystems, where resident biota exhibit narrow thermal tolerances. While microbial responses to warming are increasingly documented, the role of soil yeasts, key players in organic matter decomposition, remains poorly understood. Here, we show that warming acts as a deterministic filter, triggering a profound [...]
Meta-analysis showing that immunisation is an effective method to reduce amphibian susceptibility to the chytrid fungus
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Emerging infectious diseases are increasingly causing mortality in vertebrates, driving widespread population declines in some species. Amphibian chytridiomycosis is a lethal fungal disease that has caused population collapses and extinctions worldwide. Identifying approaches that can effectively enhance host survival is therefore an urgent conservation priority. Here, we investigate whether [...]
High-resolution modelling of biodiversity under the shared socio-economic scenarios
Published: 2026-03-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Impacts on biodiversity from global climate and land use change manifest through changes in habitat availability and suitability for species. We currently lack fine grain predictions about how species and their habitats respond at the local level to global drivers of change, particularly under future scenarios of coupled climate and land use change. Policies for biodiversity management often [...]
Addressing Unobserved Covariates in Species Distribution Models: Impacts on Inference and Mitigation via Joint Species Distribution Models
Published: 2026-03-04
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used in ecology to assess the distribution of species populations across space and time. Correlative SDMs, in particular, are used to infer relationships between species records and environmental variables. A classical approach for implementing this type of SDMs is to employ generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) as a parametric regression method. [...]
Reflective Interdisciplinarity in Practice: Integrating Biology and Philosophy in Studies of Individualization
Published: 2026-02-28
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences
Interdisciplinary research is widely acknowledged as a valuable means of knowledge production and as crucial for addressing complex scientific and societal problems. Interdisciplinary research takes many forms, and this article offers a novel case study of a distinctive form of interdisciplinarity, reflective interdisciplinarity. The article analyzes interdisciplinary research undertaken by [...]
Old habits die hard: pigeons maintain route fidelity but reduce flight altitude when exposed to a raptor-like robot
Published: 2026-02-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Prey organisms employ a range of adaptive strategies to mitigate predation risk, including camouflage, active predator deterrence by collective anti-predator behaviours, specialized predator evasion tactics, and spatial or temporal avoidance of predators. The latter may involve memorizing locations of non-lethal predator encounters and altering movement routines to subsequently avoid areas where [...]
CRITTERS: Climate, Resource, and Image Tracking in Tiny, Ecologically Representative Systems
Published: 2026-02-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Conservation and ecology research and practice is most effective when theory and models that underly species management are well explored and understood in experimental systems. Microcosm studies can provide experimental evidence to support theory, test model performance in different conditions, and suggest generality. However these benefits have been limited to primarily extinction and [...]
Aging and the Evolvability of Biological Immortality in Multicellular Organisms
Published: 2026-02-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
A lack of consensus persists in aging research about how to define, measure, and explain aging, and mechanistic (molecular) and evolutionary models remain disconnected. A mechanistic–evolutionary model is proposed that integrates concepts from Kirkwood's disposable-soma theory and Sinclair’s information theory of aging, providing a concrete framework for the causes of aging and routes to its [...]
Interpreting phage ecology, theory, and models in the genomic age
Published: 2026-02-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Viruses, particularly bacteriophages, are the most abundant biological entities across nearly all ecosystems and play a central role in shaping microbial community structure, ecosystem function, and evolution. Consequently, there has been growing interest in studying phages and their interactions within microbiomes. Mathematical modeling has long provided a foundation for investigating phage–host [...]
Three decades later: A resurvey of vegetation biodiversity in Italian coastal dunes
Published: 2026-02-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Mediterranean coastal dunes have undergone substantial transformations over the last 70 years due to increasing anthropogenic pressure and environmental change. However, most studies on dune vegetation dynamics have been conducted at local scales, limiting our understanding of long-term plant diversity trends across broader regions. Here, we present the first national-scale assessment of [...]
Beyond Observed Diversity: A Completeness-Based Invasion Theory
Published: 2026-02-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Charles Elton proposed that species-rich communities resist invasion better, but support is mainly from local studies, possibly because studies use observed richness alone, ignoring the dark diversity. I propose Completeness-Based Invasion Theory, linking invasibility inversely to community completeness, an index linking observed and dark diversity, enabling unified insights across scales.
Tapping into symbiosis to advance human microbiome research
Published: 2026-02-25
Subjects: Bacteriology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Microbiology, Pathogenic Microbiology
In human microbiome research, the term commensal is often used to describe organisms that benefit their hosts. In ecology, where the term originates, a commensal organism has no impact on its host, whereas a mutualist organism benefits its host. While others have recognized this discrepancy in terminology use, old habits are hard to break, and the human microbiome community has continued in this [...]
A new conceptual framework for host-microbe symbiosis
Published: 2026-02-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Host-microbe relationships are studied across biological disciplines, with different but related discipline-specific conceptual frameworks arising from each of them. Without a unified framework that can be applied across all symbioses, we cannot do the interdisciplinary work necessary to understand the underlying rules that govern symbiosis. Here I present a new conceptual framework for [...]