Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. Sandy Beaches & Dunes of the West African Transition
Published: 2025-05-22
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Abstract The ‘Sandy Beaches and Dunes of the West African Transition’ form a regional ecosystem subgroup along the West African coast. It had a mapped extent of 584 km² in 2022, with a width ranging from 0.012 km to 4.796 km, and stretching over approximately 1321 km. This ecosystem subgroup extends along the shores of Mauritania, The Gambia and Senegal. This ecosystem frequently experiences [...]
Revisiting the copepod diversity of Indian Sundarbans through estimation of carcasses
Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Diversity assessment of plankton traditionally considers species richness and abundance, overlooking the vital state of individuals (i.e., alive or dead). This study aimed to integrate the vital state of zooplankters into diversity indices, using the copepods of the Indian Sundarbans (IS) as an example community. It was hypothesized that when carcasses estimation (CE) is incorporated diversity [...]
Filling Monitoring Gaps for Data-deficient Species Using Annual Occupancy Predictions from Co-occurrence Models
Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Fragmented surveys and limited monitoring exclude most invertebrate species from conservation policy. We present a framework that generates annual occupancy predictions using species distribution models (SDMs) to reconstruct missing trends—not to extrapolate trends, but to fill them in (the fill-in approach). Instead of filtering poor-data regions and years or relying on static environmental [...]
NextGeneration specimen digitization: The international herbarium community goes spectral!
Published: 2025-05-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Spectral reflectance measured from herbarium specimens represents a vast source of plant phenotypic and functional trait data. 2. The potential to capture data from specimens to enhance knowledge of plant function and taxon identification has inspired many laboratories worldwide to initiate next-generation spectral digitization from specimens. 3. Combining these datasets into a coordinated [...]
Multimodal data integration to model, predict, and understand changes in plant biodiversity: a systematic review
Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
The integration of multimodal data to analyze, model, and predict changes in plant biodiversity is critical for addressing global conservation challenges. This systematic review examines the current landscape of plant biodiversity data, focusing on the identification, classification, and evaluation of key open-access data sources and integration methodologies. We highlight the strengths and [...]
Nestbox use is linked to increased paternity loss in infected blue tits, but not great tits
Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Host-parasite interactions and reproductive strategies are critical aspects of avian life history, yet knowledge of their interplay in the context of nesting site microhabitat, in particular between natural and artificial nesting sites, is lacking. The choice of nesting site is critical for successful breeding, by ensuring protection from predators and a suitable environment for incubation and [...]
Disordered and Partially Structured Models in Community Ecology: What are they? And how do we use them?
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Community ecology describes how species interact with each other and with their environment. In nature, processes can be very complex because they involve hundreds to thousands of species interacting with each other in complex environmental landscapes. Classical approaches that have provided key insights have largely focused on the study of tractable subsets of species and patches, but these do [...]
The burden of a failed error culture in biologging
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Driven by technological advancements and reduced costs, biologging has seen a rapid growth transforming the study of animal behaviour and ecology providing unprecedented insights into wildlife, aiding conservation efforts and ecological research. However, in the wake of the rapid growth loom pressing ethical and methodological challenges, including a lack of error reporting, inconsistent [...]
Transgenerational plasticity to warming decreases nutrient release by a keystone grazer
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Increasing temperatures as a result of global climate change can alter the physiology of organisms via selection for tolerant genotypes and individual-level plasticity. Organisms experiencing thermal stress can not only modify their own physiological expression, but also those of future generations; i.e. transgenerational plasticity (TGP). While warming triggered TGP is well documented, its [...]
Invisible but Identifiable: p-Chips as a Reliable Marking Method for Amazonian Bats
Published: 2025-05-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Marking techniques are essential for studying bat ecology and informing conservation efforts, yet many existing methods present challenges related to size, tag detectability, and long-term retention. P-Chips, ultra-miniaturized transponders detectable via red laser light, offer a promising alternative to traditional banding or passive integrated transponer (PIT) tags. While their use has been [...]
Interrogating metabolic plasticity in marine organisms: A framework for best practices using metabolomic and lipidomic approaches
Published: 2025-05-14
Subjects: Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Molecular Biology
Understanding the mechanisms that underlie resilience in marine invertebrates is critical as climate change and human impacts transform coastal ecosystems. Metabolic plasticity, or an organism’s capacity to modulate energy production, allocation, and use, plays a central role in mediating resilience under environmental stress. While research on marine invertebrate stress responses has grown, [...]
Ecological traits explain wild felid responses to human-modified landscapes in Brazil: an open-data approach for conservation
Published: 2025-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how wild felids respond to human-modified landscapes is critical for designing effective conservation strategies, yet comparative assessments across species remain scarce in tropical regions. Here, we assess the habitat selection and road sensitivity of nine wild felid species in Brazil using an integrative and scalable framework based entirely on open-access data. We compiled over [...]
Aligning Behavioural Ecotoxicology with Real-World Water Concentrations: Current Minimum Tested Levels for Pharmaceuticals Far Exceed Environmental Reality
Published: 2025-05-13
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Toxicology
Behavioural ecotoxicology has emerged as a key research area, offering sensitive and ecologically meaningful endpoints for detecting contaminant effects. Much of this work has focused on pharmaceutical pollutants, now widely recognised as contaminants of emerging concern. Given the field’s rapid growth and increasing data availability, we synthesised four global databases to evaluate the [...]
Negative effects of climate change and fishing activities on Alaskan seabird populations (2002-2011)
Published: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Seabird populations along the Alaskan coast have been rapidly declining due to anthropogenic climate change and other associated factors. This study examines the effects of sea surface temperature (SST) and fishing activity on the abundance of Alaskan seabird species. We downloaded bird observation data from the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) and then matched the seabird [...]
Differential assembly of core and non-core host-microbe network structures along a land-use change gradient
Published: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Microbial communities are fundamental to host health, yet their assembly dynamics under environmental change remain poorly understood. We analyzed individual-level host-microbe networks in the non-native wild black rats (Rattus rattus) across a land-use gradient in Madagascar. By applying a moving prevalence threshold, we distinguished between core and non-core microbes and compared the assembly [...]