Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems: Coral Reefs of the Eastern Tropical Pacific
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Coral reefs in the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP), covering 140 km² (0.04% of the total global coral reef extent), are under increasing climate and anthropogenic threats. Coral reef development and species distribution in the ETP are conditioned by the characteristic isolation of the region and its strong environmental variability, including El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events and [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems: Coral Reefs of the Pacific
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Coral reefs of the Pacific region extend across approximately 30°N to 30°S, covering roughly 35 500 km2. They range from tropical waters of Papua New Guinea in the West to subtropical latitudes, such as Southeastern Pitcairn or Northern Hawaii borders. This encompasses 21 coral reef ecoregions as defined by the Marine Ecoregions Of the World (MEOW) and Marine and Coastal Biodiversity Management [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems: Coral Reefs of the Western Indian Ocean
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Western Indian Ocean (WIO) coral reefs extend across the East African coastline from Somalia to South Africa, and eastward to include the Îles Éparses and island states of Madagascar, the Comoros, Seychelles and Mauritius, and the French territories of Mayotte and Réunion. The total mapped area of photic coral reef ecosystems is approximately 8090 km², representing approximately 4.5 % of the [...]
From Risk to Application: What Critically Endangered means for the world's coral reefs
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences
The first global risk assessment of coral reef ecosystems has found all fully assessed, shallow-water (photic) coral reef ecosystems are at an extremely high risk of ecological collapse in the next 50 years. This Critically Endangered risk assignment under the Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) applies to 122 of the 127 coral reef ecosystems (ecoregions) and was assessed by regional expert teams, [...]
Functional gene content of fungi in a pine needle disease system largely reflects their phylogeny
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Evolution, Forest Sciences, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Pathogenic Microbiology, Plant Pathology, Plant Sciences
Background: Fungi recovered from diseased host tissue can differ substantially in functional gene content, but interpreting that variation requires knowing how it relates to evolutionary history. Results: We assembled and annotated genomes for 67 fungi cultured from pine needles with symptoms of brown spot needle blight and compared them with 13 reference genomes, including established pine [...]
Fair-weather friends: Group size boosts reproduction in wet, cool years in a cooperative breeder
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is altering global temperature and rainfall patterns, with measurable impacts on reproduction and population persistence. These effects are pronounced in dryland ecosystems that are characterized by high temperatures, and low, but highly variable rainfall. Cooperatively breeding species (where helpers provide parental care to other group members’ offspring) are common in drylands, [...]
The social environment shapes fitness through indirect genetic effects in spotted hyenas
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Additive genetic variance in fitness determines the rate of adaptive evolution. Yet, estimates from wild populations often exceed observed rates of contemporary evolution and realised population growth rates, suggesting that important sources of variation may remain unaccounted for. One important source of variation rarely fully accounted for is the social environment, because social interactions [...]
Latitude and evolutionary history shape the global distribution of migratory butterflies
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Hundreds of butterfly species migrate globally. Seasonal migration allows butterflies track suitable environments across large distances, yet global distribution patterns and the processes that shape them remain poorly understood. Here, using season-specific habitat suitability maps for 426 migratory butterfly species, we assess how morphological traits, environmental conditions and evolutionary [...]
A common benchmark for Aedes albopictus phenological models reveals surveillance data, not model complexity, as the limiting factor
Published: 2026-10-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Forecasting the seasonal dynamics of Aedes albopictus, a highly invasive arbovirus vector now established across much of Europe, is a growing public health priority. Numerous mechanistic and correlative models have been developed over the last two decades, but largely in isolation, each calibrated and validated against its own data, which has prevented any assessment of where predictive capacity [...]
Ecosystem-based harvest strategies in regional fisheries management
Published: 2026-10-16
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Life Sciences
Fisheries have complex effects on the dynamics and structure of marine ecosystems. Single-stock management in isolation can cause ecosystems to deviate from desired states and fail to achieve both single-stock and ecosystem-wide objectives. This can be addressed through ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM), including ecosystem harvest strategies. We benchmarked the state of development of [...]
The acoustic structure and possible mechanical origin of the male Corncrake call
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
The male Corncrake Crex crex produces a distinctive repetitive call whose acoustic structure suggests a mechanically constrained sound-production system rather than a conventional tonal vocalisation. Here I describe observations obtained from approximately 800 field recordings made on Skye between 2020 and 2026 and develop a testable hypothesis for the origin of the long-duration and repetitive [...]
Dietary models of primate brain evolution omit the gut microbiome
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
DeCasien et al. reported that diet, rather than sociality, predicts relative brain size across primates, with frugivores having larger brains than folivores. Their interpretation moves the discussion from sociality towards ecology yet leaves the proposed energetic link biologically unspecified. The matter arising from this dietary framework is gut microbial metabolism, a plausible mechanistic [...]
Geographic blind spots in an extreme environment microbiome catalog
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Jiang et al. present the Extreme Environment Microbiome Catalog (EEMC), comprising 78,213 bacterial and archaeal genomes, as a global resource for microbial diversity and antimicrobial discovery. Its scale and experimental peptide characterization are substantial contributions. However, a global framing requires evidence that regional data were systematically sought, rather than simply [...]
Bird community change only partially matches landscape habitat change across five decades in North America
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
A common expectation is that as habitats in a landscape change, so do communities within them. However, this niche-based expectation assumes species persist in their favored habitats regardless of how much habitat remains; geometric constraints can counter this when heterogeneous landscapes supply too little of each habitat type for specialists to persist, allowing generalists to dominate. Using [...]
Exploring fungal invasions: observational and theoretical insights and unanswered questions
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite invasive fungi’s dramatic effects on native biodiversity and ecosystem processes, the extent of fungal invasions and the mechanisms behind them are unclear. We address this gap by synthesizing documented global macrofungal invasions to assess which fungal traits and lifestyles contribute to invasions across fungal guilds. Specifically, we analyze global observations of non-native fungi to [...]