Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Joint species distribution modelling of insect microbiota: Time to jump onto a new opportunity
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
How microbes influence insects, each other and vice versa, is a topical question in insect science. With this contribution, we highlight joint species distribution models (JSDMs) as a statistical framework particularly well suited for resolving it. While JSDM has been widely applied to micro-biota of organisms other than insects, only a handful of studies have applied them thus far to insect [...]
Applying participatory, integrated, and biodiversity-inclusive spatial planning across realms: insights from three European social-ecological systems
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Over the past two decades, a large body of knowledge on decision-support frameworks has evolved facilitating decision makers to plan for reaching biodiversity goals articulated in international policy agreements. Here, we adapted a structured decision making framework to operationalize Participatory, Integrated, and Biodiversity-Inclusive Spatial Planning (PI-BISP), providing a practical pathway [...]
Invasion impacts vary across the diel cycle: hemipterans supercharge ant ecosystem functions and restructure local invertebrate communities
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biological invasions threaten biodiversity and ecosystem functions, often causing cascading effects across trophic levels. Yet how these impacts vary over the fundamental day–night cycle remains largely overlooked. On Barrow Island, a high-conservation-value reserve off northwestern Australia, we examined how infestations of the non-native scale insect Saissetia miranda (Hemiptera: Coccidae) on a [...]
Joint species distributions reveal crop type and field-specific assembly rules and idiosyncrasies in carabid beetle occurrences and abundances
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Designing effective biodiversity conservation and pest regulation strategies in agroecosystems requires understanding how environmental gradients and assembly rules jointly structure ecological communities. 2. We fitted a hurdle joint species distribution model (jSDM) to presence–absence and conditional abundance data of 20 carabid species sampled across 57 arable fields in three French [...]
Avian Population Genomics: Latest Findings and Future Prospects
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Birds are one of the most recognizable and diverse groups of organisms on Earth. This group has played an important role in many fields, including the development of methods in behavioral ecology and evolutionary theory. The use of population genomics took off following the increased accessibility of high-throughput sequencing across taxa. Several features of bird genomes make them particularly [...]
Natural history models of bird–building collisions
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Building collisions kill an estimated 1.28–5.19 billion birds annually in North America, making them the second leading cause of human-related avian mortality. Yet the behavioral and ecological drivers of collisions remain difficult to disentangle, as most knowledge derives from carcass surveys rather than direct observations. Here, we propose a conceptual framework that synthesizes four natural [...]
Geospatial tree species prediction using multi-view drone imagery and computer vision
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
Imagery from uncrewed aerial vehicles (“drones”) is an increasingly popular modality for understanding forests at a large scale due to its relatively low cost and ability to be collected on demand. Computational tools to identify the location of individual trees and their species can inform forest management efforts, such as prioritizing regions to thin to reduce wildfire risk. Previous work on [...]
Within-Community-Sampling Power Analysis to Detect Richness Change
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Reliable biodiversity monitoring requires understanding how sampling effort influences detectability of meaningful changes in species richness. Increased sampling within independent units has been shown to reduce measurement error, while sampled richness estimates are often subject to bias. However, robust methods for quantifying the relationship between sampling effort and the power to detect [...]
Choosing the Response Matrix: Generalised Linear Latent Variable Models for Multivariate Ecology and Evolution
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Multivariate responses are central to ecology and evolutionary biology, but their covariance is often difficult to model and interpret. Generalised linear latent variable models (GLLVMs) provide a parsimonious way to represent covariance among many responses using a smaller number of latent variables. They are widely used for Site X Species data in joint species distribution modelling and [...]
Capsicum pubescens Ruiz & Pav.: evolutionary history, genetic resources and future opportunities for an overlooked Andean chile
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Growing concerns over food security, agrobiodiversity loss, and climate change are driving renewed interest in neglected and underutilized crops with high agronomic, nutritional, and adaptive potential. Capsicum pubescens Ruiz & Pav. is one of the five domesticated chile pepper species and a distinctive crop of Andean agriculture. Adapted to cool mountain environments and characterized by its [...]
Droplet-induced surface aeration, not acoustic sensing, most parsimoniously explains accelerated germination of submerged rice seeds
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
When water drops strike the surface above submerged rice seeds, the seeds germinate faster, an effect that scales with drop height and falls off sharply with distance. Makris and Navarro1 attributed this to acoustic stimulation of statoliths, specialised gravity-sensing organelles, suggesting seeds can effectively sense the sound of raindrops. Here I argue that a simpler, well-established [...]
Structural and functional skin microbiota on cane toads across 16,000 km of invaded range
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Host-associated microbial communities are shaped by environmental availability, host filtering, microbial interactions, and prior pathogen exposure, with connected habitats promoting greater adaptive microbiome potential. Across the invasive range of cane toads, containing expansive disconnects between populations, we found strong spatial variation in skin bacterial communities, including among [...]
The Fish Fauna of Tubbataha Reefs is highly Biodiverse and distinctively Oceanic
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Zoology
We surveyed the fish fauna of Tubbataha Reefs, a remote and well-protected coral reef system in the Philippines. Tubbataha is located in the Coral Triangle, the region with the highest marine biodiversity in the world, and is a no-take marine protected area. We found a total of 534 species, with the Labridae (65 species), Pomacentridae (60 species), Gobiidae (60 species), Chaetodonidae (33 [...]
Visual-chemotactic saltatory search in Octopus hummelincki (Mollusca, Cephalopoda): a case study in the South Atlantic
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
We report for the first time evidence of foraging by Octopus hummelincki and analyze it using saltatory search theory, which posits alternating phases of locomotion and stationary search. Our data showed that substrate complexity dictates behavioral transitions: locomotion predominated in sand, whereas solid substrates elicited tactile exploration. The move-to-search scaling ratio (0.63) aligns [...]
Body condition, but not reproductive success, is associated with sociality in a colonial seabird.
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Ornithology, Zoology
Body condition, breeding habitat quality and access to socially acquired information are generally associated with higher fitness in social animals. In colonial species that breed in dense aggregations, such as seabirds, the combined effects of these factors on reproductive success have rarely been tested together. In this study, we investigated the relationship between fledging success, body [...]