Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
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 [...]
Predictive movement ecology using spatial simulations
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The active movement of animals is fundamental to the structure and function of ecosystems globally. In recent years, reductions in the size and cost of animal tracking equipment have precipitated an explosion of interest in movement ecology, accelerating our understanding of the causes and consequences of animal movement. Until recently, movement ecology was largely a descriptive science. [...]
Heat tolerance in bees: a meta-analysis of ecological, evolutionary, and methodological drivers
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change poses a growing threat to bees, which provide essential pollination services in natural and agricultural ecosystems. Although the critical thermal maximum (CTmax) is widely used to assess the vulnerability of pollinators to climate change, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the factors shaping heat tolerance across bee species globally. We conducted a systematic review and [...]
Reopening the Strait of Hormuz: from a bioinvasion super-spreader warning to species–vessel–port prioritisation
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Prolonged vessel lay-up can create an exceptional biosecurity hazard by allowing fouling assemblages to accumulate before vessels re-enter shipping networks. A recent study highlighted this risk following closure of the Strait of Hormuz and recommended pre-departure biofouling assessment, route forecasting, early detection and rapid communication. These measures address vectors and pathways, but [...]
What goes up, must come down: air–soil microbiome connectivity and its implications for ecosystem functioning
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Soils harbor Earth's largest reservoir of microbial diversity, yet enormous numbers of microorganisms are continuously aerosolized, transported through the atmosphere, and redeposited across landscapes. Although soil and the atmosphere have largely been studied separately, here, we propose a conceptual framework that views soils and the atmosphere as a coupled microbiome linked by bidirectional [...]
Heatwave-mediated maternal effects: heat stress in late but not early pregnancy has carry over effects on offspring phenotype
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Heatwaves are extreme climatic events driven by climate change that profoundly affect animal survival and reproduction. Although evidence for the direct effects of heatwaves on reproduction is increasing, much less is known about whether heatwaves during pregnancy generate maternal effects on offspring, and whether these effects depend on the timing of exposure. Pregnancy is a metabolically [...]
Cell-autonomous immunity and the endosymbiotic theory: Septins at the origin?
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The origin of complex eukaryotic cells remains a long-standing mystery. Endosymbiosis gave rise to mitochondria and chloroplasts, the bacteria-derived organelles that underpin eukaryotic productivity. Early eukaryotes had to establish these partnerships while avoiding pathogens, using limited ancestral tools. Septins are cytoskeletal GTP-binding proteins best known for roles in cytokinesis, yet [...]
The Cohort Net Reproductive Rate: an empirically grounded approach to R0 for structured populations and epidemics
Published: 2026-08-27
Subjects: Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Population Biology
The net reproductive rate, or per-generation population growth rate R0, is a key concept for population and epidemic dynamics, because persistence versus extinction is often determined by the sign of R0−1. Because it is defined as generation-to-generation growth, it is hard to assess empirically for structured populations or epidemics where generations overlap, and is usually estimated by [...]
How many ways are there to be a phage?
Published: 2026-08-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Virology
The search for predictive rules for how microbiomes assemble and function rarely include their most abundant members: phages. Nearly a century of phage research has yielded few ecological principles for the impacts of phages within microbial communities – sequencing surveys resolve phage presence but not phage activity, while mechanistic studies of relatively few model phages provide insights [...]
The short-term effects of wildfire on heathland bird communities: a case study at Killarney National Park, Ireland
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fire is a key driver of ecosystem structure and function globally, yet climate and land-use change are driving increasingly variable wildfire patterns, with important consequences for biodiversity and ecological processes. Post-fire community dynamics are shaped by ecological, landscape and fire characteristics, but as these drivers change, understanding avian community-level responses is [...]
An Updated Checklist of the Amphibians of Bangladesh: Taxonomic Diversity, Distribution, and Conservation Status
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Bangladesh is situated at the confluence of the Indo-Himalayan and Indo-Burma biodiversity hot spots and is home to a rich but poorly known amphibian fauna. By synthesizing published literature, museum records, historical reports, online biodiversity databases, recent taxonomic revisions, newly described species, and verified field observations, this study provides an updated [...]
Measure what the coarsening removes: a precondition for interpreting spatial-resolution comparisons in ecological models
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Ecological models increasingly use "scale-free" downscaled climate surfaces, assuming finer resolution predicts local response better. Even a comparison that varies resolution alone can fail to test it: over a small extent, coarsening barely changes the predictors. I give a diagnostic that detects this before any model is fitted, and calibrate it. 2. The comparison was built at two British [...]
Candidozyma auris (Candida auris) as a harbinger of novel fungal pathogens
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Medical Microbiology, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Pathogenic Microbiology
Mammals are protected from fungal pathogens by two evolutionary pillars: adaptive immunity and elevated body temperature. Anthropogenic climate change is eroding this thermal barrier, while a concurrent decline in human basal body temperature accelerates convergence from both directions. The emergence of Candidozyma auris (Candida auris), a thermotolerant, multidrug-resistant pathogen that arose [...]
Regional specificity without methodological fragmentation: a perspective on invasion-risk screening of Mediterranean freshwater fishes
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Regional ecological context is essential in invasion-risk screening but need not require development of a region-specific decision-support tool. The Mediterranean specificity of the Hellenic Risk Assessment (HeRA), developed for freshwater fishes in Greece, has been presented as a principal advantage over the globally employed Invasiveness Screening Kit (ISK) tools. In this Perspective, I show [...]
The intensity of sexual selection and the absence of assortative mating patterns in Prunella modularis (Aves: Passeriformes)
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
When females and males prefer large mating partners, a size-assortative mating pattern can occur, and larger individuals tend to obtain more partners, thereby increasing the intensity of sexual selection. Considering this, we studied a population of dunnocks (Prunella modularis), a species with a variable mating system. We tested whether (A) assortativity (based on body size and/or condition) [...]