Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Pedigree metrics: What are they good for?
Published: 2026-10-30
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: 2026-10-30
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: 2026-10-30
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: 2026-10-30
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: 2026-10-30
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: 2026-10-30
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: 2026-10-30
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: 2026-10-29
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: 2026-10-29
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 [...]
Sleep as Obligate Phenotypic Switching: An Ultimate Explanation for Temporal Niche Partitioning
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Why does natural selection mandate an involuntary, internally generated state change rather than permit flexible behavioral inactivity? Existing theories explain what sleep accomplishes – synaptic homeostasis, metabolite clearance, energy conservation – but these are proximate mechanisms, not ultimate explanations: themselves products of selection, yet adaptations acquired by the sleeping state [...]
Noise as a global change driver: a meta-analysis of its fitness consequences for birds
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health
Anthropogenic noise is a widespread yet underappreciated global pollutant. Despite mounting evidence that noise may affect the physiology and behaviour of birds, its consequences for fitness, and thus its capacity to impact population and evolutionary processes, remain unclear. Here, we conduct a pre-registered systematic review and meta-analysis of the causal effects of anthropogenic noise on [...]
Reef fish biodiversity guarantees productivity
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Biodiversity loss on coral reefs may threaten their functioning and services to humanity. However, the impacts of biodiversity change on reef fish productivity, a key function that sustains millions of humans, are not well understood. Here, we compiled a global dataset of coral reef fish surveys to examine whether assemblage biodiversity promotes productivity, in both space and time. Diversity [...]
Signals of ecological decline and increasing genomic inbreeding in Western Hudson Bay polar bears
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is a leading cause of population declines. Predicting the evolutionary consequences of such declines can be challenging for long-lived species because slow generation times and the overlap of individuals from multiple generations within a population can obscure signals of genetic diversity losses. We integrated four decades of environmental, demographic, and genomic data from the [...]
Weeds are plants of human-modified environments, not plants out of place
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
The question “What makes a plant a weed?” has persisted in both the agricultural sciences and plant ecology and evolution for well over a hundred years. Various authors—agriculturists focused on crop yield, ecologists examining community assembly, and plant biologists interested in adaptation—have each defined the term weed. However, these definitions, developed from unique vantage points, have [...]
Rethinking success and quality in ecological forecasting
Published: 2026-10-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Ecological forecasts are increasingly required to inform science, policy and action in the face of rapid environmental and societal change. However, differences in how developers and end-users judge the value of ecological forecasts may limit their utility and uptake in real-world decision-making. Here, we use a participatory approach to propose a novel, holistic framework for the evaluation of [...]