Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Vegetation responses to managed river flow events and regimes
Published: 2026-04-02
Subjects: Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Vegetation communities are an important part of riverine ecosystems and can be severely impacted by changed flow conditions in regulated waterways, making them a priority for waterway management. Environmental flows are a commonly used tool to mitigate some of the impacts from regulated flow regimes and provide benefits to vegetation communities. Ongoing and effective use of environmental flows [...]
Policy Pathways for Enabling Mussel Shell Reuse in Marine Restoration in Chile
Published: 2026-04-02
Subjects: Environmental Law, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences
Chile is the world’s second-largest producer of mussels and the leading exporter, harvesting approximately 400,000 t/year, of which about 30% becomes shell waste. While this biomaterial poses a growing disposal challenge, it also represents an opportunity for marine ecological restoration. In southern Chile, where mussel farming is concentrated, efforts to reuse shells as nature-based solutions [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the South-west Australian Shelf
Published: 2026-04-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the South-west Australian shelf is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Great Australian Bight, Houtman, Leeuwin, South Australian Gulfs, and Western Bassian. The South-west Australian shelf mangrove province mapped extent in 2020 was 198.8 km2 across, representing 0.1% of the global mangrove area. [...]
Efficient Bayesian implementations of capture-recapture models with Stan
Published: 2026-04-02
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Survival Analysis
Capture-recapture (CR) methods are a mainstay of ecological statistics for estimating demographic parameters and population sizes in animal populations. The advent of Bayesian methods made complex hierarchical formulations accessible to practitioners, largely relying on conditional likelihood formulations with latent discrete parameters. However, modern gradient-based MCMC methods that are the [...]
Celtic rainforest and ancient woodland indicator plants on an anthropogenic site at the Holy Loch, Argylll, Scotland
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
This study documents the floristic, bryological and rainforest lichen composition of a young, anthropogenic woodland at Holy Loch Nature Reserve (HLNR), Argyll. Although the woodland is no more than 75 years old and established on upper, roadside saltmarsh and on an adjacent, capped industrial landfill, it supports a species assemblage characteristic of hyper-oceanic temperate rainforest. Surveys [...]
Incorporating population genomic perspectives into kelp conservation and aquaculture in the Pacific Northwest
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Recent kelp forest declines and growth in the kelp aquaculture industry have fueled increasing interest in ecological and evolutionary research on kelp forests, including kelp population genomics. While many kelp management activities have inherent genetic and evolutionary implications, kelp management in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of North America has to date made only limited use of [...]
On the role of biogeography in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In the first half of the 20th century, the Modern Synthesis (MS) integrated Mendelian genetics, paleontology, systematics, natural history, common descent, and natural selection. Although the MS has been the guiding paradigm of evolutionary studies since 1950, by the beginning of the 21st century, a new synthesis incorporated themes such as evo-devo, phenotypic plasticity, and epigenetic [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Australian Coral Sea
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Australian Coral Sea is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of the Central and Southern Great Barrier Reef, Coral Sea, Torres Strait Northern Great Barrier Reef, and Tweed-Moreton. The Australian Coral Sea mangrove province mapped extent in 2020 was 2398.3 km2 across, representing 1.6% of the global [...]
Mitigating the Pollinator-Prey Conflict in Drosera capillaris: A Study on Physiological Plasticity and Phylogenetic Conservatism within Drosera
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Premise: Carnivorous plants face a dilemma: acquiring nutrients from insect prey while simultaneously relying on insect pollinators for reproduction. Thus, carnivorous plants have evolved mechanisms to avoid/reduce pollinator-prey conflict. This study aims to understand how carnivorous plants deal with this conflict through: macroevolutionary adaptations (floral stalk length) or short-term [...]
Sex differences in avian plumage evolution: stronger effects of natural selection and social competition on females
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Sexual dichromatism in birds may evolve via sexual selection for increased elaboration in male plumage (Darwin hypothesis) or, alternatively, by natural selection for increased crypsis in female plumage (Wallace hypothesis). Both these effects may be counteracted by social competition promoting ornamentation in females. However, the relative roles of sexual, natural, and social selection in [...]
Long-term community management of agrobiodiversity zones reduces agricultural expansion and natural cover loss.
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Global food system resilience is weakened by over reliance on a narrow range of crops and the erosion of traditional farming knowledge. Agrobiodiversity Zones (ABDZs) in Peru represent a novel and globally unique, community-led legal instrument for in situ agrobiodiversity conservation. However, the long-term impact of community-led stewardship and associated traditional farming practices on [...]
Climate warming reduces seed mass in European beech through altered resource dynamics and drought
Published: 2026-03-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Seed mass is a key life-history trait that influences dispersal, seedling establishment, and plant fitness, yet its long-term response to climate change remains poorly understood. We used two long-term datasets of European beech (\textit{Fagus sylvatica}) from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands (1976-2024) to test whether seed mass has changed over time and whether any decline can be [...]
Replicards: Teaching and simulating evolution with a card-based experiment
Published: 2026-03-31
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
The teaching of biological evolution in high schools is often reduced to an account of the history of evolutionary thought. As a result, students assimilate evolutionism more as a philosophical current of thought led by distinguished thinkers than as a fruitful area of scientific research. Often, mere verbal exposition is not enough for students to truly understand evolutionary phenomena, such as [...]
A framework for predicting the effects of climate warming on arthropod disease vectors
Published: 2026-03-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Predicting the effects of climate warming on vector-borne disease transmission is a crucial research priority. Predictions that can reliably inform policy need to be based on vector biology, but models that incorporate biological realism are often difficult to test with the limited amount of information available for most disease vectors. Here we present a framework for predicting warming effects [...]
Trophic niche structure of invertebrate-eating bats and birds in West African rice agroecosystems revealed by DNA metabarcoding
Published: 2026-03-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences
Knowledge of animal community diets is essential for understanding ecosystem functioning. Bats and birds are important groups of invertebrate predators, managing their populations. However, the diets of West African species and the mechanisms shaping them remain poorly understood. In this study, we investigated these mechanisms in agricultural landscapes of Guinea-Bissau using metabarcoding and [...]