Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
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. This ``golden era'' of animal tracking provides 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 [...]
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 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: 2025-05-12
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 [...]
Applying essential ecosystem service variables to analyse thirty years of wild salmon provisioning trends in Canada
Published: 2025-05-12
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: 2025-05-12
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: 2025-05-08
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: 2025-05-08
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 [...]