Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Resurrecting host–microbiome interactions: combining resurrection ecology and microbiome transplants to test temporal local adaptation
Published: 2026-11-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Host-associated microbiomes can influence fitness, respond rapidly to environmental change, and potentially contribute to host adaptation. Yet, determining whether host–microbiome associations evolve adaptively over ecological timescales remains challenging because historical host genotypes and their associated microbial communities are rarely available for experimental comparison. Resurrection [...]
Mixed evidence that protected areas slow declines of threatened plant species in Germany
Published: 2026-11-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. A central credo of plant conservation is that the most effective way to protect native plants is to conserve the habitats in which they occur. Protected areas are therefore a cornerstone of plant conservation, and much research has focused on optimizing their representativeness across species. Far fewer studies, however, have tested whether protected populations actually persist over time. [...]
Cave spider trophic dynamics, network structure and competition: cave zone, taxonomy and bat presence drive hypogean interactions
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology
Cave ecosystems are shaped by unique environmental constraints, influencing species distributions and trophic interactions. Spiders are often the dominant predators in caves, but their diet is restricted by local parameters that likely intensify competition and other intraguild interactions, including the confinement of energy flows to detrital and chemoautotrophic pathways. The hypogean [...]
The Apparent Urban Advance in Juvenile Vulpes vulpes Observations Diminishes after Accounting for Switzerland's Elevational Structure
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Urbanization can alter wildlife life cycles, but comparisons between more and less urbanized environments may be confounded by other environmental gradients. This study analyzed 4295 human-reported observations of \textit{Vulpes vulpes} from 496 generalized \(5 \times 5\ \mathrm{km}\) cells across Switzerland between 2018 and 2024 to estimate when the probability that a spring record contained [...]
Exploring exploration: A multidimensional analysis of exploration across standardised and semi-natural contexts in rats
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Exploration is a major personality trait in animals that reflects individual differences in gathering information about environmental features relevant to survival and reproduction. Yet, exploration is commonly assessed using brief standardised tests, which provide a convenient but artificial experimental setting. Whether such measures reflect how individuals explore complex and changing [...]
Who should still peer-review, for whom, and with what tools?
Published: 2026-11-02
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Education, Engineering, Law, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In drafting On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin developed his thoughts through extensive correspondence with trusted colleagues, seeking feedback on ideas, manuscripts, and proofs. This informal peer-review process, like many others of its time, was based on personal trust, academic respect, and reputation rather than guided by any institution, and it helped pave the way for modern peer [...]
Pedigree metrics: What are they good for?
Published: 2026-10-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Estimating additive genetic variance (V_A) is key to understanding evolutionary potential in wild populations. V_A is commonly estimated using relatedness data from pedigrees in so-called `animal models'. The accuracy of these estimates depends strongly on information in the pedigree. Typically metrics describing pedigree structure (such as the number of individuals, maternities, pedigree depth [...]
Ancient human occupation alters modern forest traits, structure and biomass in neotropical forests.
Published: 2026-10-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
There is considerable debate as to how extensively neotropical forests were shaped by ancient people. This uncertainty has implications for the global carbon cycle because forest plots may be disproportionately located in formerly occupied areas, potentially biasing estimates of tropical forest growth and carbon uptake. Ground measurements within the formerly occupied Maya city of Xmakabatun [...]
The spatial dynamics of nutrient limitation in communities of generalist predators of crop pests
Published: 2026-10-31
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Nutrition, Zoology
Generalist arthropod predators vitally control crop pests, but their ability to perform this role relies on them obtaining sufficient nutrients within simplified crop environments. Field margins are thought to provide habitat and resources for predators, such as ground beetles, but how far into fields this provision extends is poorly understood. Since arthropod nutrient contents can vary [...]
Urban greenspace drivers of bird species richness differ between migratory and resident species across the full-annual cycle
Published: 2026-10-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Urban greenspaces are increasingly under pressure from urbanization. Greenspaces provide some of the last remaining resources for biodiversity in cities, but their ecological value varies substantially among sites. Despite their importance, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of which urban greenspaces species use across the full-annual cycle and among migratory groupings. To investigate [...]
Genomic costs without functional consequences in short-range endemics trapped in evolutionary refugia
Published: 2026-10-31
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Evolution, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics
Species with small geographic ranges are often concentrated in evolutionary refugia, landscapes that support viable populations through significant climate oscillations. Under long-term stable environments and with small population size, species are predicted to evolve narrow climatic tolerances, lose genetic diversity and accumulate harmful mutations. Together, these predictions suggest that [...]
One Paleopathology: A Deep-Time Framework for Predicting Malaria Resurgence in the Climate Crisis
Published: 2026-10-31
Subjects: Archaeological Anthropology, Arts and Humanities, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Climate, Diseases, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Parasitic Diseases, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Malaria, the deadliest vector-borne disease in human history, is resurging under climate change, land-use change, shifting public health priorities, and declining global funding. In this Personal View, we argue that One Paleopathology, an interdisciplinary framework that integrates bioarchaeology, paleogenomics, historical (written) sources, paleoclimatology, and disease ecology, offers critical [...]
Will AI inadvertently push a natural history renaissance?
Published: 2026-10-31
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
As AI automates coding and statistical modelling, quantitative ecologists face an existential crisis. But automated analysis is only as good as the data it is fed, shifting the scarce resource from analysis to expert observation. Naturalists and field ecologists, increasingly ‘endangered’ species in the modern era, may experience a resurgence, if institutions act.
Modeling Mosquito Dynamics and West Nile Virus Risk in Canada: A Systematic Mapping Review of Approaches and Research Gaps
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mosquito population dynamics are strongly shaped by environmental conditions and are central to mosquito-borne disease risk. In Canada, West Nile virus (WNV) remains the dominant mosquito-borne viral disease of public health concern, while climate change may alter mosquito distributions, seasonal activity, and the risk of WNV and other emerging mosquito-borne diseases. This systematic mapping [...]
A circulation-based hypothesis for vertebrate body plan evolution and endothermy
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
The emergence of novel vertebrate body plans and endothermy remain central questions in evolutionary science. Although gene regulatory networks provide powerful explanatory frameworks, the contribution of systemic physiology to vertebrate evolution warrants further investigation. Here, a hypothetical circulation-based model is proposed that integrates the redox and magnetic properties of blood [...]