Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
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 treatment of data in [...]
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 catchment morphology drive thermal regime variation among sub-Arctic ponds, and possible effects on resident Arctic charr
Published: 2025-01-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Thermal stratification, which is a common feature of lentic freshwater systems, has extensive effects on ecological interactions and ecosystem function, including processes that may determine which ponds can support fish populations and affect growth, phenology, and metabolism where populations exist. Because these habitats are important for Northern freshwater fishes, improvement of our ability [...]
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 [...]
From Policy to Practice: Progress towards Data- and Code-Sharing in Ecology and Evolution
Published: 2025-01-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
High quality research data and analytical code are essential for ensuring the credibility of scientific results, are key research outputs, and are crucial elements to facilitate reproducibility. However, in ecology and evolution (E&E) in particular, it is currently unknown how many journals have policies on data- and code-sharing for peer review purposes, or upon manuscript acceptance. [...]
What’s On The Menu Today? First Report of Nectarivory for Rhynocorus cuspidatus (Hemiptera: Reduviidae)
Published: 2025-01-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
This study reports the first observation of nectarivory in the predator reduviid Rhynocoris cuspidatus (Ribaut, 1921) in Spain. One individual of R. cuspidatus was observed sucking nectar from a Jacobeae vulgaris Gaertn flower inflorescence in a grassland meadow in Berrecil de la Sierra (Spain). Our observation suggested that R. cuspidatus can use floral resources to obtain sugar or moisture [...]
Charles Brook, Newfoundland – watershed overview and recommendations for conservation of its Atlantic salmon
Published: 2025-01-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Using seed germination as a proxy of restoration success
Published: 2025-01-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecological restoration of post-mining landscapes is critical to mitigating the environmental impacts of extraction activities. This study compares the effectiveness of geomorphic restoration (GR) versus conventional restoration (CR) techniques in improving soil water availability and seed germination dynamics in the Fortuna quarry, a Mediterranean post-mining site in Spain. Soil water content [...]
Reproductive consequences of mate retention and divorce in a short-lived migratory passerine
Published: 2025-01-16
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In socially monogamous birds, pair bond duration varies widely across species, from single-breeding associations to long-lasting, multi-year bonds. Studies on mate retention and divorce have predominantly focused on long-lived species, while research in short-lived and migratory species is limited. Consequently, the fitness consequences of divorce or remating in these species remain unclear. [...]
A concept highlighting the interplay between α-niche evolution and β-niche evolution in bacteria
Published: 2025-01-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
When bacteria evolve new traits, this can be either to our benefit or harm. Trying to steer and control evolution in desirable directions is a major, but daunting aspiration of recent research. In natural systems and complex communities, however, it is repeatedly observed that trait evolution regularly deviates from predicted avenues suggested by in vitro experimentation on monocultures. This [...]