Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
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 [...]
Kin recognition in non-native plants: a general hypothesis of invasiveness
Published: 2026-02-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how non-native plants successfully invade new environments is a fundamental question in invasion ecology. Here, we propose a novel hypothesis of kin recognition - the ability of plants to differentiate between closely related and distantly related neighbors - as a mechanistic explanation for invasion success. To evaluate the idea, we reviewed existing evidence for kin recognition in [...]
Composite virulence: useful metric or conceptual trap?
Published: 2026-02-20
Subjects: Animal Diseases, Animal Experimentation and Research, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Immunopathology, Life Sciences, Medical Microbiology, Microbiology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Parasitic Diseases, Parasitology, Pathogenic Microbiology, Plant Pathology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology
Virulence, the harm an infection causes to its host, is a cornerstone concept in ecology and evolution, yet it remains difficult to quantify because infection impact is multidimensional, dynamic, and context-dependent. Infections can reduce host performance through multiple, partially redundant routes (including mortality, fecundity loss, behavioural impairment, and physiological disruption), [...]
Anergiobiosis: a testable framework for microbial life under extreme power limitation
Published: 2026-02-20
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology
"Aeonophily" was recently suggested as a new category of extremophily for ultra-slow-growing subsurface microorganisms. This terminology conflates a physiological state with potential extremophilic specialization. We propose "anergiobiosis" to describe life without sufficient power to sustain cell division, separating this state from questions about specialization. Analogous to temperature [...]
A Framework for Questionable Research Practices in Ecological Modelling
Published: 2026-02-20
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resource Management
1. Questionable research practices (QRPs) bias the published literature towards apparently strong and conclusive results, resulting in low rates of replicability. Recent metaresearch reveals that ecology is not immune to the ‘reproducibility crisis’ seen in other disciplines, due to similar rates of QRPs and a lack of transparency in published research. However, metaresearch to date focuses on [...]
Roe Deer show an affinity for woodland and reluctance to cross roads
Published: 2026-02-19
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Animals use landscapes unequally and have differential responses to anthropogenic changes such as land cover modification. Predicting such responses can be challenging, requiring knowledge of animal movements. This knowledge is particularly valuable where human-animal interactions have implications for either's well-being. Large herbivores, with relatively high mobility, often come in contact [...]
Maternal swimming exercise training improves survival and the heritability of thermal tolerance and length in brown trout offspring
Published: 2026-02-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Changing the narrative: encroached savannas are not forest
Published: 2026-02-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Savannas are globally important ecosystems but are often misclassified as forests because they can support high tree cover, leading to misguided management. This misunderstanding arises because the presence of grasses, a key defining component of savannas, critical for their structure and functioning, is overlooked. 2. Fundamental tree-based misunderstandings affect the interpretation of [...]
Chemical Ecology of Arachnids - Morphology, Behaviour, and Semiochemicals
Published: 2026-02-17
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Arachnids represent a diverse and ecologically influential paraphyletic assemblage of chelicerate arthropods that has colonized virtually every terrestrial habitat. Arachnids contribute to ecosystems as predators, parasites and decomposers. Yet, the chemical mechanisms that allow arachnids to interact with the environment remain strikingly understudied relative to their taxonomic breadth. Much of [...]
mrangr: An R package for mechanistic simulation of metacommunities
Published: 2026-02-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Metacommunity theory unifies ecology by integrating local biotic interactions with regional dispersal and environmental filtering. However, testing theoretical predictions against empirical data remains challenging due to the difficulty of disentangling these processes in nature and the confounding effects of imperfect detection. 2. Here, we introduce mrangr, an R package designed for the [...]