Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Australian Coral Sea
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Australian Coral Sea is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of the Central and Southern Great Barrier Reef, Coral Sea, Torres Strait Northern Great Barrier Reef, and Tweed-Moreton. The Australian Coral Sea mangrove province mapped extent in 2020 was 2398.3 km2 across, representing 1.6% of the global [...]
Mitigating the Pollinator-Prey Conflict in Drosera capillaris: A Study on Physiological Plasticity and Phylogenetic Conservatism within Drosera
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Premise: Carnivorous plants face a dilemma: acquiring nutrients from insect prey while simultaneously relying on insect pollinators for reproduction. Thus, carnivorous plants have evolved mechanisms to avoid/reduce pollinator-prey conflict. This study aims to understand how carnivorous plants deal with this conflict through: macroevolutionary adaptations (floral stalk length) or short-term [...]
Sex differences in avian plumage evolution: stronger effects of natural selection and social competition on females
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Sexual dichromatism in birds may evolve via sexual selection for increased elaboration in male plumage (Darwin hypothesis) or, alternatively, by natural selection for increased crypsis in female plumage (Wallace hypothesis). Both these effects may be counteracted by social competition promoting ornamentation in females. However, the relative roles of sexual, natural, and social selection in [...]
Long-term community management of agrobiodiversity zones reduces agricultural expansion and natural cover loss.
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Global food system resilience is weakened by over reliance on a narrow range of crops and the erosion of traditional farming knowledge. Agrobiodiversity Zones (ABDZs) in Peru represent a novel and globally unique, community-led legal instrument for in situ agrobiodiversity conservation. However, the long-term impact of community-led stewardship and associated traditional farming practices on [...]
Climate warming reduces seed mass in European beech through altered resource dynamics and drought
Published: 2026-03-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Seed mass is a key life-history trait that influences dispersal, seedling establishment, and plant fitness, yet its long-term response to climate change remains poorly understood. We used two long-term datasets of European beech (\textit{Fagus sylvatica}) from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands (1976-2024) to test whether seed mass has changed over time and whether any decline can be [...]
Replicards: Teaching and simulating evolution with a card-based experiment
Published: 2026-03-31
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
The teaching of biological evolution in high schools is often reduced to an account of the history of evolutionary thought. As a result, students assimilate evolutionism more as a philosophical current of thought led by distinguished thinkers than as a fruitful area of scientific research. Often, mere verbal exposition is not enough for students to truly understand evolutionary phenomena, such as [...]
A framework for predicting the effects of climate warming on arthropod disease vectors
Published: 2026-03-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Predicting the effects of climate warming on vector-borne disease transmission is a crucial research priority. Predictions that can reliably inform policy need to be based on vector biology, but models that incorporate biological realism are often difficult to test with the limited amount of information available for most disease vectors. Here we present a framework for predicting warming effects [...]
Trophic niche structure of invertebrate-eating bats and birds in West African rice agroecosystems revealed by DNA metabarcoding
Published: 2026-03-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences
Knowledge of animal community diets is essential for understanding ecosystem functioning. Bats and birds are important groups of invertebrate predators, managing their populations. However, the diets of West African species and the mechanisms shaping them remain poorly understood. In this study, we investigated these mechanisms in agricultural landscapes of Guinea-Bissau using metabarcoding and [...]
Deep learning scans for selective sweeps using RAiSD-AI
Published: 2026-03-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Recent advances in method and software development for selective sweep detection focus on using deep learning to improve detection performance. However, the adoption of deep learning in real-world analyses is slow, hindered by the lack of reusable tools that alleviate the interdisciplinary friction of integrating such methods for practical deployment. This chapter walks the reader through the [...]
The collapse of environmental predictability erodes reproductive success in a Tropical seabird
Published: 2026-03-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change can alter not only when seasonal events occur on average, but also how predictable they are from year to year. Many long-lived seabirds show a paradox: breeding dates remain stable even as populations decline. Using two decades of data from Blue-footed Boobies (Sula nebouxii), we tested whether loss of environmental predictability could reduce reproductive success even when mean [...]
Historical subtidal regime shifts echoed in adjacent intertidal community
Published: 2026-03-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Anthropogenic stressors can trigger regime shifts, causing ecosystems to reorganize into new states. Moreover, there is growing evidence of the importance of fluxes (e.g., energy, matter and nutrients) in linking adjacent systems, suggesting that regime shifts within one system may extend to neighbouring systems through cross-ecosystem interactions. However, empirical evidence supporting this [...]
Integration of ecological knowledge in European landscape architecture: a systematic project-description review
Published: 2026-03-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Urban Studies and Planning
Landscape architecture has a strong environmental focus and clearly states the ambition to integrate ecological knowledge in its practice and theory. This study aims to assess the state of the art in integrating ecology in landscape architecture project design, identifying well-integrated ecological knowledge areas and potential knowledge gaps, to support future development of this integration. [...]
Predicting decay in functional diversity in plant communities under future climates
Published: 2026-03-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is expected to cause widespread shifts in the composition of plant communities. However, the extent to which these changes will alter the composition and diversity of plant functional traits is less clear. Here, we assess how climate change may reshape the functional diversity of 32,996 plant communities by combining data on their traits and realised climatic niches with future [...]
How environmental conditions affect the acquisition, establishment, and persistence of microbial endosymbiosis in insects
Published: 2026-03-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Microbiology
Long-term interactions between insect hosts and their internal microbial symbionts are ubiquitous. As these interactions support many aspects of the insect host biology, restrictions to their establishment and maintenance could have important consequences to the survival of insects and functioning of ecosystems. The current literature provides extensive evidence that rapidly changing [...]
Species, geography, and weather conditions predict offshore migration in songbirds
Published: 2026-03-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The increasing development of offshore wind farms raises concerns about potential effects on migratory songbirds. Current wind farm monitoring techniques, such as radar, infrared cameras and motion detectors, capture this risk in general, but cannot reliably identify individuals to species level and thus fail to detect species-specific exposure to these structures. Due to their spatial focus on [...]