Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Interrogating metabolic plasticity in marine organisms: A framework for best practices using metabolomic and lipidomic approaches
Published: 2025-05-13
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: 2025-05-12
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: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Toxicology
Behavioural ecotoxicology has rapidly emerged as a key area of research, offering sensitive and ecologically meaningful endpoints for detecting sub-lethal effects of contaminants. Much of this work has focused on pharmaceutical pollutants, now widely recognised as contaminants of emerging concern in aquatic systems. Given the field’s rapid growth and the availability of large-scale open-access [...]
Negative effects of climate change and fishing activities on Alaskan seabird populations (2002-2011)
Published: 2025-05-11
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: 2025-05-11
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 [...]
Applying essential ecosystem service variables to analyse thirty years of wild salmon provisioning trends in Canada
Published: 2025-05-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Wild salmon commercial fisheries in British Columbia (BC), Canada, have seen decreasing return and catch numbers across multiple salmon populations. Successful management of this ecosystem service (ES) has been elusive, but there is recognition that a wider social-ecological perspective is needed to support recovery. While ES monitoring is essential for evidence-based management, the [...]
Direct and indirect interactions among warming, water, and growing condition slow decomposition rates of temperate-boreal tree litter
Published: 2025-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Plant litter decomposition is a primary control on carbon fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems around the world. Individually, the key mediators of decomposition rates—litter traits, temperature, and moisture—are relatively well understood. However, our understanding of how combined drivers influence decomposition remains limited. To test how multiple, interactive climate change factors directly [...]
The promise of environmental RNA research beyond mRNA
Published: 2025-05-07
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Environmental RNA (eRNA) studies have primarily focused on species detection and community composition through metabarcoding or metatranscriptomics, and on gene expression through messenger RNA (mRNA) abundance analysis. While valuable, this focus overlooks the broader functional roles of other RNA types in cellular metabolism. Beyond mRNA, non-coding RNAs as well as structural RNAs play critical [...]
Unifying occupancy-detection and local frequency scaling (Frescalo) models
Published: 2025-05-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Frescalo’s “local frequency scaling” and classical occupancy-detection models both seek to recover true species‐occurrence signals from imperfect data. In this paper, we show that the two approaches rest on the same underlying detection mathematics. Occupancy models treat each site’s repeat visits as independent detection trials and separately estimate occupancy probability and per-visit [...]
Inter-specific relationships and their ecological role in an oceanic elasmobranch community
Published: 2025-05-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Marine ecosystems support a diverse array of co-occurring species, whose presence and abundance influence the behavior, population dynamics, and distribution of interacting organisms. Elasmobranchs play a central role in marine ecological processes as top and meso-predators across various ecosystems. Previous work has shown that some elasmobranchs are key to ecosystem health and resilience, [...]
Biodiversity science is improved when silent herbaria speak
Published: 2025-05-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Herbaria represent a global biodiversity heritage essential for botanical research and conservation assessments. Despite their importance, herbaria in many parts of the world—especially in under-resourced regions such as much of Africa—are “silent”. These silent collections are poorly integrated into global research networks and hence underused and especially vulnerable to neglect. Here, we [...]
IQ2MC: A New Framework to Infer Phylogenetic Time Trees Using IQ-TREE 3 and MCMCTree with Mixture Models
Published: 2025-05-05
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences
IQ-TREE and MCMCTree are two widely used phylogenetic tools to infer phylogenetic trees and estimate divergence times, respectively. As MCMCTree performs fast approximate Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling to obtain the times along a fixed tree topology, it would be natural to use IQ-TREE to obtain the tree. However, it is currently not possible to integrate these tools seamlessly, as MCMCTree [...]
Evolutionary rate incongruences in squamates reveal contrasting patterns of evolutionary novelties and innovation
Published: 2025-05-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Understanding the rate of phenotypic evolution can reveal fundamental aspects of organismal evolutionary trajectories. Hence, several studies have attempted to detect the tempo of evolution for multiple organisms, although based on radically different datatypes (e.g., discrete and morphometric) and methods (phylodynamic vs comparative methods). Here, we ask whether these competing approaches [...]
Responses of wintering corvids to New Year’s Eve fireworks in Berlin
Published: 2025-05-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Animals around the globe are strongly affected by anthropogenic disturbances, creating concerns for welfare and conservation. Fireworks during New Year’s eve are a major, regularly recurring anthropogenic disturbance, causing light, noise as well as air pollution. In the present study, we investigated behavioural responses of mixed-species flocks of corvids (hooded crows, Corvus cornix, rooks, [...]
Practical genetic diversity protection: an accessible framework for IUCN subpopulation and Evolutionarily Significant Unit identification
Published: 2025-05-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) sets global conservation standards, including the Red List of Threatened Species and the Green Status of Species. Recent analyses showed that genetic diversity has not been effectively considered by IUCN species assessments, despite being fundamental to species’ fitness and adaptive potential. Incorporation of genetic diversity into IUCN [...]