Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Connectivity for the conservation of Borneo’s biodiversity
Published: 2025-08-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ecological connectivity is fundamental to biodiversity conservation and climate adaptation, facilitating species movement, genetic exchange, and ecological function across landscapes. In Borneo, connectivity is increasingly threatened by deforestation, agricultural expansion, infrastructure development, and urbanization, leading to habitat fragmentation and isolation. This chapter examines the [...]
The Norfolk Island Proposal
Published: 2025-08-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
This paper proposes a novel ecological intervention: Ethical Marine Offal Dumping (EMOD) as a low-cost, high-impact method of restoring apex predator presence in marine ecosystems. Using Norfolk Island as a case study, where tiger sharks are significantly larger and more abundant than regional norms, the paper explores the unintended yet beneficial ecological consequences of routine livestock [...]
Eclipse of reason: debunking speculative anticipatory behavior in trees
Published: 2025-08-12
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Advancing plant behaviour research requires adherence to robust experimental designs, the formulation of alternative falsifiable hypotheses, sufficient replication, and stringent controls. These tenets safeguard the field from slipping into pseudoscience. A recent study by Chiolerio et al. (2025) claims that Picea abies trees collectively anticipate solar eclipses via electrome-based signalling. [...]
Rethinking termite methane emissions: does the mound environment matter?
Published: 2025-08-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Termites are important decomposers in tropical ecosystems, and they emit methane (CH4) from digesting plant matter. Termite contributions to global CH4 emissions are calculated using species-specific termite CH4 emissions from individuals (termite emission factors; TEF) and estimated biomass, which overlooks how the termite mound environment may alter emissions to the atmosphere. Factors such as [...]
Using Elicit AI research assistant for data extraction in systematic reviews: a feasibility study across environmental and life sciences
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Data extraction in systematic reviews, maps and meta-analyses is time-consuming and prone to human error or subjective judgment. Large Language Models offer potential for automating this process, yet their performance has been evaluated in a limited range of platforms, disciplines, and review types. We assessed the performance of the Elicit platform across diverse data extraction tasks using [...]
What we talk about when we talk about microbial species
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Genome annotation, alignment, and phylogenetics are at the center of most work in evolutionary genomics. These techniques function best when rooted in prior work. Genes are mined from new genomes using evidence from old gene models. These genomes are aligned to well-worn references to create matrices for tree reconstruction. And trees are often populated with well characterized genomes to add [...]
Strain-specific thermal acclimation, but little evidence of transgenerational plasticity, in an asexual crustacean
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Transgenerational plasticity has been suggested as a means for species to succeed in rapidly changing environments, such as increased temperature brought on by climate change. However, the evidence for this phenomenon in animals is mixed. The freshwater crustacean Daphnia magna displays transgenerational plasticity in response to environmental cues such as the presence of predators or food, but [...]
Mitonuclear divergence predicts gradual speciation in animal hybrid zones
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
The core of speciation is the genetic incompatibilities underlying the evolution of reproductive isolation. Hybrid zones provide unique opportunities to unravel the evolutionary rate of reproductive isolation in the origin of species. The selection against hybrids accrues with increased genetic incompatibilities and drives the evolution of reproductive isolation in the face of gene flow. There [...]
Predictive Evolutionary Genomics: Principles, Validation, and Practice
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Population Biology
Contemporary evolution occurs on observable timescales, enabling prospective evolutionary forecasting with quantitative frameworks rather than only retrospective inference. We propose a unified probabilistic framework that integrates three approaches linked to detectability windows through time. Trait-based models use multivariate quantitative-genetic equations to project correlated phenotypic [...]
Trapper Citizen Science: an open-source camera trap platform for citizen science in wildlife research and management
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Computational Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Effective wildlife monitoring is essential for biodiversity conservation and sustainable management, particularly in the face of rapid environmental changes and human-wildlife interactions. Advances in camera trap technology and citizen science, here used to denote non-professional involvement in scientific research, irrespective of citizenship status, have revolutionized ecological data [...]
Global 1-km land cover for ecological modelling from very high resolution imagery
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Birdwatchers’ attitudes and preferences that influence their decisions to engage in local, national, and international birdwatching trips
Published: 2025-08-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Birdwatching tourism has significant economic potential and is a growing form of ecotourism. Birdwatchers throughout the United States have diverse attitudes and motivations, and here we sought to understand how, and why, birdwatchers select birdwatching destinations at local, in-country, and international scales. A questionnaire survey (n=427 participants) revealed that 98% participate in local [...]
Northern Riches and Rangifer Risks: A review of the Impacts of Resource Extraction for Caribou and Reindeer
Published: 2025-08-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
As the global demand for energy continues to rise rapidly, northern ecosystems—i.e. Arctic, subarctic, and boreal regions—are especially at risk due to their rich mineral and hydrocarbon potential. The expansion of infrastructure associated with extractive industries often impacts species and may ultimately contribute to population declines, particularly for those less resilient to environmental [...]
Improving the temporal transferability of species distribution models under climate change by incorporating historical species-climate relationship
Published: 2025-08-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how species will respond to climate change is one of the current key challenges in ecology and nature conservation. The tempo-spatial variations of climate makes it more challenging to predict species responses to climate change across their entire ranges. Species distribution models have been widely used for identifying how species distributions respond to climatic drivers. Despite [...]
Trait shifts during range expansions: A meta-analysis
Published: 2025-08-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Populations undergoing range expansions often undergo phenotypic shifts at the leading edge. Understanding how traits change during range expansions could provide insight into predicting invasive species dynamics and responses to climate change. Theory predicts that edge populations should increase in dispersal capability and shift towards reproductive traits that maximize fecundity over [...]