Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Land use gradients drive spatial variation in Lassa fever host communities in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone.
Published: 2025-02-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Epidemiology, Life Sciences, Virus Diseases
The natal multimammate mouse (Mastomys natalensis) is the primary reservoir host of Lassa mammarenavirus (LASV), a zoonotic pathogen causing Lassa fever that is endemic to West Africa. The occurrence and abundance of this species is regulated by the human environment and biotic interactions with other small-mammal species, but these ecological drivers remain poorly understood in the regions [...]
Proposing a socialecological framework for successful grassland restoration in Germany – an overview and insights from the Grassworks project
Published: 2025-02-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Bending the biodiversity curve and delivering on biodiversity promises from international agreements and laws, including Kunming-Montreal and the EU Restoration Law, requires upscaling ecological restoration from smaller to larger spatial and temporal dimensions and across different spheres of society. Achieving this depends on a strong scientific evidence base and synthesis of effective [...]
Measuring critical thermal maximum in aquatic ectotherms: a practical guide
Published: 2025-02-03
Subjects: Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Critical thermal limits, commonly quantified as CTmax (maximum) or CTmin (minimum), are core metrics in the thermal biology of aquatic ectotherms. CTmax, in particular, has recently surged in popularity due to its various applications, including understanding and predicting the responses of animals to climate warming. Despite its growing popularity, there is a limited literature aimed at [...]
Combined effects of land-use- and climate-driven stressors on stream fungi and organic matter decomposition
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Freshwater microbial communities are essential for maintaining ecosystem functions and services, with aquatic fungi playing a particularly critical role in decomposing terrestrial organic matter entering streams and converting it into energy and nutrients that sustain higher trophic levels. However, freshwater ecosystems face growing threats from multiple stressors. The combined effects of these [...]
Forever an optimist? Investigating the temporal consistency of optimism within and across life phases in rats
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
It is long known from human psychology that people differ in their perception of the world, with some judging ambiguous information more positively (i.e., “optimists”) and some more negatively (i.e., “pessimists”). About 20 years ago, this knowledge was transferred to animal welfare science to assess emotional states in animals by quantifying optimistic or pessimistic judgement biases. More [...]
Emergence, spread, and impact of high pathogenicity avian influenza H5 in wild birds and mammals of South America and Antarctica, October 2022 to March 2024
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
The currently circulating high pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) virus of the subtype H5 causes variable illness and death in wild and domestic birds and mammals, as well as in humans. This virus evolved from the Goose/Guangdong lineage of HPAI H5 virus, which emerged in commercial poultry in China in 1996, spilled over into wild birds, and spread through Asia, Europe, Africa and North America [...]
Phylogenetic Signal in Shell Morphology of the Chemosymbiotic Lucinidae (Bivalvia)
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Lucinidae are the most specious family of extant chemosymbiotic bivalves and occupy a wide range of habitats worldwide. All extant lucinids examined to date house chemosynthetic endosymbionts within their gill tissues. Fossil evidence suggests a Silurian origin for the family, with chemosymbiotic associations dating back to at least the Late Jurassic. Previous systematics work indicates that [...]
Incorporating responses of functional traits to changing climates into species distribution models: A path forward
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Conventional species distribution models (SDMs) typically consider only abiotic factors, thus overlooking critical biotic dimensions, including functional traits that play an important role determining species’ distributions in changing environments. Process-based models explicitly incorporate functional traits and have been applied to SDMs. However, their parameterization can be complex and [...]
Bridging data silos to holistically model plant macrophenology
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
● Phenological response to global climate change can impact ecosystem functions. There are various data sources from which spatiotemporal, and taxonomic phenological data may be obtained: mobilized herbaria, community-science initiatives, observatory networks, and remote-sensing. However, analyses conducted to date have generally relied on single sources of these data. ● Siloed [...]
Assessment of Urban Bias in Iberian Butterfly Sampling through Citizen Science Data
Published: 2025-01-24
Subjects: Entomology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Citizen science platforms have revolutionized biodiversity monitoring by enabling large-scale data collection. However, concerns about potential biases, such as urban sampling bias, have raised questions about the quality and representativeness of these datasets. This study assesses the spatial distribution of butterfly observations collected through the citizen science platform Biodiversidad [...]
Seed biology and regeneration niche of the threatened cold desert perennial Ivesia webberi A. Gray
Published: 2025-01-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding the regeneration niche is of critical importance for the conservation of rare plants, yet species-specific information is often lacking for key components of the plant life cycle such as seed dormancy and germination. We conducted a detailed study of the regeneration niche for Ivesia webberi, a U.S. federally threatened forb that is endemic to the Great Basin Desert. Using seeds [...]
Weather and landscape morphology drive thermal regime variation among Mývatn ponds, and implications for resident Arctic charr
Published: 2025-01-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Thermal stratification is common in lentic freshwater systems, and has extensive effects on ecosystem function and the interactions between aquatic organisms and their surroundings. Although thermal regimes in temperate systems are well-characterized, small arctic and subarctic lakes and ponds can have irregular thermal regimes, and the conditions leading to stratification and mixing are less [...]
Assessing migration and moulting strategy in closely related taxa based on stable isotope analysis: a population study of Balearic and Yelkouan shearwaters across their breeding range
Published: 2025-01-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Animal migrations are unique phenomena involving mass movements of individuals, which pose significant challenges to develop conservation strategies. Migratory seabirds, particularly, face many anthropogenic threats across their distributions, and populations are declining worldwide. We provided a thorough isotopic method to characterise individual migratory patterns and identify main moulting [...]
Bottom-up interactions in age-structured stock assessment and state-space mass-balance modelling
Published: 2025-01-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology
Age-structured stock assessment models are used worldwide to predict the likely impact of changing harvest on future fisheries yield. However, age-structured models ignore the impacts of predator consumption on prey survival (top-down impacts) and prey availability on predator growth (bottom-up impacts), whereas multispecies statistical catch-at-age models often incorporate top-down but not [...]
Can transcriptome size and off-target effects explain the contrasting evolution of mitochondrial vs nuclear RNA editing?
Published: 2025-01-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mitochondrial RNA editing has evolved independently in numerous eukaryotic lineages, where it generally restores conserved sequences and functional reading frames in mRNA transcripts derived from altered or disrupted mitochondrial protein-coding genes. In contrast to this “restorative” RNA editing in mitochondria, most editing of nuclear mRNAs introduces novel sequence variants and diversifies [...]