Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Flexible Resource Use but Consistent Parental Care across Populations in a Nocturnal Raptor
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Parental investment is often quantified by how much food offspring receive, yet parental behaviour throughout the breeding phase and the timing and composition of resource delivery may be equally important. We tested this by integrating behaviour, diet and activity rhythms in two populations of tawny owl (Strix aluco) in northern Europe. Parental behaviour followed conserved temporal patterns [...]
A Priori Prediction of Population Growth of Parnassius smintheus.
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
A priori testing of a model, i.e., predicting an event before it happens, is the gold standard for model validation. This model testing approach steps up ecological modeling beyond simply explaining the past to proactive predictive modeling by challenging the ability of theories to make accurate forecasts before new data are collected, a litmus test of how well we understand the systems we study. [...]
Maternal traits and ecological conditions shape mother-offspring association in a capital breeding mammal
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Maternal investment is central to life history theory and population dynamics. However, variation in maternal behaviors mediating investment, and the drivers and consequences of such variation, remain poorly understood. Using 30 years of data from 565 northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris), we evaluated the intrinsic and extrinsic factors influencing mother-offspring association, [...]
Linking movement to mortality: a framework for predicting anthropogenic mortality hotspots in wide-ranging animals
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Human activities and their impacts are a major source of mortality for wide-ranging animals, yet conservation efforts often remain reactive because it is difficult to predict where mortality is most likely to occur. Approaches to understand and reduce wildlife mortality typically rely on coarse-scale associations between mortality events and landscape features, limiting their ability to identify [...]
Robust and realistic power analysis for cost-effective monitoring of occupancy trends
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Structured monitoring programs play a key role in identifying whether a population is declining, stable, or increasing, and power analyses allow program planners to determine the number of sampling units required to reliably estimate a specified trend (e.g., 1% annual decline) with a specified error rate (e.g., α=0.20, or 80% power). Increasingly, monitoring programs track trends in site [...]
Leveraging participatory science data to detect and quantify elevational range shifts in birds
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
One of the primary expectations—and observed consequences—of persistent warming temperatures is range shifts to higher elevations. However, the ability to detect and attribute climate-driven range shifts has historically been limited to rare locations with sufficient time-series data, which are especially rare outside temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Leveraging data from [...]
Contextual evidence for categorising interactions and guiding their discovery
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Ecological interactions shape community dynamics and stability, yet many go unrecorded. Link prediction methods attempt to tackle incomplete knowledge, but predictions are only conjectures, and validating them all in the field is neither feasible nor desirable. Furthermore, interactions differ in the action needed for their detection. Validation therefore must be guided by ecological and [...]
Heterogeneity in Nantucket Harbor: A Case Study in Spatial Variation, Temporal Exposure, and Coastal Habitat Assessment
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Nantucket Harbor has experienced substantial changes in water quality, together with losses of important biological resources that have long sustained the island. Both local and global effects have been linked to changes in nutrient concentration, water clarity, temperature and dissolved oxygen, which in turn have been associated with a decrease in eelgrass coverage and variation in bay scallop [...]
Computational classification of SOD2 protein in coral and symbiotic algae from public genomic and transcriptomic data
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
SOD2, or Manganese/Iron Superoxide Dismutase, plays a crucial role in maintaining cellular health across the tree of life. Existing literature is vague in identifying types of SOD2 proteins expressed in both corals and their symbiotic algae; most agree on the presence of a) mitochondrial targeting MnSOD in corals, and b) likely Mn dependent SOD2 in algae. This paper presents evidence for four [...]
Bryophyte community responses to long-term warming manipulations vary greatly between contrasting tundra habitats
Published: 2026-08-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Bryophytes are a diverse group of plants, both taxonomically and functionally. Although they are a major vegetation component in many tundra habitats and affect ecosystem function in various ways, they have not received full attention in studies on responses of tundra plant communities to climate warming. Here we compared bryophyte community structure, taxonomic composition, diversity and [...]
Gray wolves follow white-tailed deer across Wisconsin (2018-2025), rising briefly after the 2021 wolf harvest
Published: 2026-08-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Earlier analyses of county-level extracts of the Snapshot Wisconsin camera network suggested that gray wolves (Canis lupus) arrive at cameras shortly after white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), select antlered bucks, and displace deer, but their wolf samples were too small to settle whether following rose after the February 2021 wolf harvest, whether displacement weakens near development, [...]
Protecting confidential data when using AI coding assistants: A practical guide
Published: 2026-08-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) coding assistants can substantially accelerate research workflows in ecology, fisheries science, and related quantitative disciplines, but they also create new pathways for accidental or adversarial disclosure of confidential information. Researchers in these fields routinely work with legally protected and commercially sensitive records (e.g., [...]
Connecting Habitats: Wildlife Occupancy Across the Satpura-Pench Corridor
Published: 2026-08-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Satpura–Pench Corridor (SPC) is one of the most important wildlife linkages in Central India, connecting the Satpura and Pench Tiger Reserves, and facilitating the movement and persistence of tigers and other large mammal meta-populations across the Central Indian landscape. However, habitat fragmentation, infrastructure development, mining, agricultural expansion, and other anthropogenic [...]
The knowledge landscape of jaguar science: rapid growth, thematic structure, and regional inequalities
Published: 2026-08-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how scientific effort is distributed is essential for evaluating the evidence available to guide species conservation. We assessed the temporal, thematic, methodological, and spatial organization of jaguar (Panthera onca) research across the species’ range. Using 1,028 bibliographic records, we applied a metadata-based scope filter, defining a primary analytical corpus of 857 [...]
Marine holobionts: a model arena for host–microbe biology, from ecosystem function to biotechnology
Published: 2026-08-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Microbial symbioses are the operating system of marine biology. Nearly every macroscopic organism in the ocean exists as a holobiont, the consortium composed of a eukaryotic host and its bacterial, archaeal, microeukaryotic and viral partners. Marine holobionts span a broader range of the metazoan tree of life than likely any other ecological setting on the planet. This breadth makes the marine [...]