Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Making use of oak genomes
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Genomics, Life Sciences
This review summarizes the contributions of genomics to our understanding of oak evolution and management, both past and ongoing. Far from being exhaustive given the large number of publications following the publication of the genomes, this review emphasizes work conducted in the decade following publication of the first two complete oak genome assemblies, and major findings and achievements [...]
HARBOUR PORPOISE RESPONSES TO PILE DRIVING ARE BETTER PREDICTED BY DISTANCE TO SOURCE THAN BY ENERGY-BASED RECEIVED SOUND LEVELS
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Regulatory assessments for offshore construction are required to avoid impacts on protected marine mammals through noise-related injury or disturbance. Criteria for injury risk are widely accepted, but the extent to which behavioural responses are related to noise levels or co-varying contextual factors such as proximity remains uncertain. 2. This study used arrays of echolocation detectors [...]
Livestock subsidise tiger diets in a central Indian corridor: implications for human-wildlife conflict management and conservation planning
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Large carnivores, like tigers, maintain a balance within their respective ecosystem and play a critical role. However, due to their life history needs and extensive overlap with humans, they face significant threats across their distribution. These threats become severe when they inhabit non-protected areas like corridors and kill livestock. In this study, the food habits of tiger were assessed [...]
An epibiotic association between burrowing and sessile bivalves on the Amazon continental shelf: implications for ecological facilitation in sediment-dominated environments
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
From the perspective of ecological facilitation theory, we report an epibiotic association between two mollusk species with contrasting lifestyles, Chama macerophylla Gmelin, 1791 (sessile) and Tucetona pectinata (Gmelin, 1791) (burrowing), on the Amazon continental margin. Specimens were collected using a Van Veen dredge near the shelf break and in the vicinity of AP3 blocks recently offered for [...]
Winter chilling regulates seedling development in Mediterranean terrestrial orchids cultivated in vitro
Published: 2026-05-11
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Effective ex situ propagation is critical for the conservation and restoration of threatened terrestrial orchids. However, large-scale propagation remains constrained by developmental bottlenecks including the transition from protocorms to plantlets with storage organs. Although cold exposure is often recommended to improve propagation success, the thermal conditions governing survival and [...]
Hybridization in Animal Evolution
Published: 2026-05-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In the past two decades, it has become clear that hybridization is so common in animal species as to be an almost universal feature of their evolutionary histories. Remnants of both ancient and contemporary hybridization events are present in the genomes of modern species, but their consequences are still not completely understood. In this review, we synthesize what is known about the [...]
Data analysis choices influence the relative importance of multiple stressors on macroinvertebrates in agricultural streams
Published: 2026-05-09
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Robustness of multiple stressor rankings is essential for credible ecotoxicological assessments and policy guidance, yet how data aggregation and modelling choices shape conclusions about stressor importance remains poorly resolved. We addressed this gap using a fully reproducible approach on a widely cited dataset of 101 small agricultural streams across Germany, where earlier data analyses have [...]
The social environment has little impact on inbreeding depression in a social mammal
Published: 2026-05-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Inbreeding depression describes the decline in fitness caused by breeding between relatives and is now known to be widespread in natural populations. Yet, its relative strength across different fitness components and its sensitivity to social and demographic environments are poorly understood. Using nearly 30 years of life-history, behavioural, pedigree and genomic data from a wild population of [...]
The presence of generalist plants in urban greenspaces predicts pollinator diversity
Published: 2026-05-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Urban greenspaces are increasingly important for pollinator conservation, yet it remains unclear whether pollinator diversity is better predicted by overall plant richness or by the presence of particular plant species with central roles in the pollination network, referred to as hub species. Using community science observations from 39 urban greenspaces in Broward County, Florida, we constructed [...]
From repeated baseline HRV monitoring to activity-and-recovery assessment in a trained dolphin: a preliminary protocol report
Published: 2026-05-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Heart rate variability (HRV) may provide useful physiological information for welfare assessment in managed dolphins. Previous preliminary work proposed HRV analysis as a potential tool for evaluating welfare-related physiological states in dolphins. As a further step, this preliminary protocol report documents the development and initial implementation of a baseline-informed [...]
Invasiveness reshapes the historical pattern of carp trait evolution
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Human-mediated invasions are increasingly recognised as contemporary ecological disturbances with profound impacts on microevolutionary processes. However, whether such impacts extend beyond microevolutionary change to alter long-term evolutionary trajectories across lineages remains poorly explored. Using a global phylogenetic analysis of nearly 1,400 carp species (freshwater fishes of the [...]
Identifying knowledge gaps on simultaneous above- and belowground organism responses to global change
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Global change affects all terrestrial organisms regardless if they live above or below the ground. Even though they are strongly linked by various direct and indirect interactions, organisms can respond very differently to global change stressors, due to different features of above- and belowground compartments. Many different organism groups have shown declines in diversity, abundance or biomass [...]
Multi-scale surveillance reveals substantial egg-laying winter activity in Aedes albopictus mosquito populations across temperate Europe
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
The Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), a competent vector for dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses, has expanded rapidly across temperate Europe. European vector surveillance typically operates May to October, assuming winter diapause precludes activity and transmission risk. However, recent field observations suggest sustained egg-laying winter activity in southern European populations, [...]
Assessing the sensitivity and robustness of the Living Planet Index through simulated population dynamics: strengths, stability, and challenges
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Understanding population change through time is crucial for effective conservation of biodiversity. The Living Planet Index (LPI) is a key indicator for tracking global species abundance trends under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, offering a picture of population change over time. However, the sensitivity of the index to population abundance being recorded as absent in a [...]
Exploring the legal, policy, ethical and practical implications of digitisation of botanical and fungal collections
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Collections-based institutions around the world hold an extraordinary wealth of information and knowledge through the specimens and associated information that they house.. In recent years, institutions holding botanical and fungal collections have invested significant energy and resources into the digitisation of these collections to make them more accessible and better connected. Digitisation [...]