Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
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 [...]
Stronger Evidence for Trait–Environment Association by Pre-processing of Abundance Tables
Published: 2026-02-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding trait–environment relationships is central to predicting community responses to environmental change, yet statistical evidence for such relationships is often weak in observational datasets. Here, I introduce an N2-processing method for abundance tables, grounded in the observation that the precision of community weighted means (CWMs) and species niche centroids (SNCs) is [...]
High-Resolution Coastal Blue Carbon Site Intelligence: A Multi-Attribute Geospatial Pipeline for National-Scale Mangrove Assessment
Published: 2026-02-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Life Sciences, Systems Biology
The voluntary blue carbon market is severely bottlenecked by outdated methodologies that apply broad, coast-level carbon averages across low-resolution spatial units, systematically failing to account for micro-site ecological realities and critical socio-political constraints. To resolve this structural deficit, this paper introduces the High-Resolution Geographically-Explicit Blue Carbon [...]
The Global Lakes Explorer: A basin-to-global scale data visualisation application for the assessment of nutrient emissions to lakes
Published: 2026-02-24
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Phosphorus and nitrogen are critical plant nutrients, essential for fertiliser production and global food security. However, poor management across the anthropogenic nutrient cycles leads to losses associated with pollution of water bodies, driving eutrophication, biodiversity loss, and methane emissions. Addressing these interconnected challenges requires a sustainable, integral, and where [...]
BABAPPAΩ: Diagnosing the Identifiability of Episodic Selection under Branch–Site Evolution Using Likelihood-Free Neural Inference
Published: 2026-02-24
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Life Sciences
Episodic positive selection acting on specific evolutionary lineages is a longstanding yet intrinsically difficult target of molecular inference. Classical branch–site methods formulate this problem as hypothesis testing under explicit codon substitution models, implicitly assuming that episodic selection is statistically identifiable from finite alignments. Under biologically realistic [...]
A Niche in the Machine: The Promise of AI Foundation Models for Species Distribution Modeling
Published: 2026-02-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Species distribution models (SDM) are fundamental tools for conservation, yet methodological progress has stalled. Despite two decades of refinement, traditional approaches – MaxEnt, boosted regression trees, random forests – have approached a performance ceiling, and deep learning has failed to break through on species distribution data. TabPFN, a foundation model that learns to perform Bayesian [...]
Global Patterns Predict Local Biodiversity Shifts in a Climate Change Hotspot
Published: 2026-02-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is redistributing life on Earth, and global-scale biogeographical patterns can inform expectations for local ecological responses. As thermal envelopes shift towards higher absolute latitudes and deeper depths in the ocean, fixed locations are experiencing changes in their niche space, driving changes in abundance, occurrence, and community composition. Here, we examine intertidal [...]
A new effect size for meta-analysis of magnitude: lnM
Published: 2026-02-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Statistics and Probability
Meta-analyses in ecology and evolution often consider the magnitude of differences between groups rather than their direction. Yet, a common practice is to coerce signed effects (e.g., d and response ratio) into magnitudes by taking absolute values. This transformation induces strong upward bias and non-normal (Gaussian) sampling distributions, violating the assumptions of standard meta-analytic [...]
A Merlin Falco columbarius at the southern fringe of its Asian wintering range in Madhya Pradesh, India
Published: 2026-02-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Merlin Falco columbarius is a small falcon considered an uncommon winter visitor to northwestern India, with records from the central part of the country being extremely scarce and the species often regarded as accidental in peninsular India. Here, I report a rare, well-documented observation of a Merlin from Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, in central India. The bird was observed and photographed at [...]