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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences

What goes up, must come down: air–soil microbiome connectivity and its implications for ecosystem functioning

Beatriz Sánchez-Parra, Nico Eisenhauer

Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Microbiology

Soils harbor Earth's largest reservoir of microbial diversity, yet enormous numbers of microorganisms are continuously aerosolized, transported through the atmosphere, and redeposited across landscapes. Although soil and the atmosphere have largely been studied separately, here, we propose a conceptual framework that views soils and the atmosphere as a coupled microbiome linked by bidirectional [...]

Heatwave-mediated maternal effects: heat stress in late but not early pregnancy has carry over effects on offspring phenotype

Chiara Morosinotto, Merel C. Breedveld, Alessandra Stevanato, et al.

Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Life Sciences

Heatwaves are extreme climatic events driven by climate change that profoundly affect animal survival and reproduction. Although evidence for the direct effects of heatwaves on reproduction is increasing, much less is known about whether heatwaves during pregnancy generate maternal effects on offspring, and whether these effects depend on the timing of exposure. Pregnancy is a metabolically [...]

Cell-autonomous immunity and the endosymbiotic theory: Septins at the origin?

Masayuki Onishi, Wallace Marshall, Gautam Dey, et al.

Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

The origin of complex eukaryotic cells remains a long-standing mystery. Endosymbiosis gave rise to mitochondria and chloroplasts, the bacteria-derived organelles that underpin eukaryotic productivity. Early eukaryotes had to establish these partnerships while avoiding pathogens, using limited ancestral tools. Septins are cytoskeletal GTP-binding proteins best known for roles in cytokinesis, yet [...]

The Cohort Net Reproductive Rate: an empirically grounded approach to R0 for structured populations and epidemics

Christophe F.D. Coste, Steven M. Sait, Mike Fowler, et al.

Published: 2026-08-27
Subjects: Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Population Biology

The net reproductive rate, or per-generation population growth rate R0, is a key concept for population and epidemic dynamics, because persistence versus extinction is often determined by the sign of R0−1. Because it is defined as generation-to-generation growth, it is hard to assess empirically for structured populations or epidemics where generations overlap, and is usually estimated by [...]

How many ways are there to be a phage?

Rachel Szabo, Martin Ackermann

Published: 2026-08-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Virology

The search for predictive rules for how microbiomes assemble and function rarely include their most abundant members: phages. Nearly a century of phage research has yielded few ecological principles for the impacts of phages within microbial communities – sequencing surveys resolve phage presence but not phage activity, while mechanistic studies of relatively few model phages provide insights [...]

The short-term effects of wildfire on heathland bird communities: a case study at Killarney National Park, Ireland

Thomas Robert Howells, Kilian Kelly, Tom Gittings, et al.

Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences

Fire is a key driver of ecosystem structure and function globally, yet climate and land-use change are driving increasingly variable wildfire patterns, with important consequences for biodiversity and ecological processes. Post-fire community dynamics are shaped by ecological, landscape and fire characteristics, but as these drivers change, understanding avian community-level responses is [...]

An Updated Checklist of the Amphibians of Bangladesh: Taxonomic Diversity, Distribution, and Conservation Status

Inan Rayan, Monirul Islam

Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences

             Bangladesh is situated at the confluence of the Indo-Himalayan and Indo-Burma biodiversity hot spots and is home to a rich but poorly known amphibian fauna. By synthesizing published literature, museum records, historical reports, online biodiversity databases, recent taxonomic revisions, newly described species, and verified iNaturalist  observations, this study provides an updated [...]

Measure what the coarsening removes: a precondition for interpreting spatial-resolution comparisons in ecological models

Joshua Wang

Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

1. Ecological models increasingly use "scale-free" downscaled climate surfaces, assuming finer resolution predicts local response better. Even a comparison that varies resolution alone can fail to test it: over a small extent, coarsening barely changes the predictors. I provide a diagnostic detecting this before a model is fitted. Though the variance decomposition is classical, calibrating it [...]

Candidozyma auris (Candida auris) as a harbinger of novel fungal pathogens

Carla Elektra Schuh, Chaitanya S. Gokhale

Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Medical Microbiology, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Pathogenic Microbiology

Mammals are protected from fungal pathogens by two evolutionary pillars: adaptive immunity and elevated body temperature. Anthropogenic climate change is eroding this thermal barrier, while a concurrent decline in human basal body temperature accelerates convergence from both directions. The emergence of Candidozyma auris (Candida auris), a thermotolerant, multidrug-resistant pathogen that arose [...]

Regional specificity without methodological fragmentation: a perspective on invasion-risk screening of Mediterranean freshwater fishes

Lorenzo Vilizzi

Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Life Sciences

Regional ecological context is essential in invasion-risk screening but need not require development of a region-specific decision-support tool. The Mediterranean specificity of the Hellenic Risk Assessment (HeRA), developed for freshwater fishes in Greece, has been presented as a principal advantage over the globally employed Invasiveness Screening Kit (ISK) tools. In this Perspective, I show [...]

The intensity of sexual selection and the absence of assortative mating patterns in Prunella modularis (Aves: Passeriformes)

Grazieli da Silva Cerqueira, Eduardo S. A. Santos, Benedikt Holtmann, et al.

Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Life Sciences

When females and males prefer large mating partners, a size-assortative mating pattern can occur, and larger individuals tend to obtain more partners, thereby increasing the intensity of sexual selection. Considering this, we studied a population of dunnocks (Prunella modularis), a species with a variable mating system. We tested whether (A) assortativity (based on body size and/or condition) [...]

From environmental heterogeneity to stability: beta-diversity stabilises biomass across space

Benedikt Brunner, James G. Hagan, Jesper Hasselöv, et al.

Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Life Sciences

Understanding how biodiversity influences ecosystem stability across heterogeneous landscapes is a central challenge in ecology. The spatial insurance hypothesis proposes that turnover in species composition stabilises ecosystem processes in heterogeneous environments by allowing species to occupy the habitats where they perform best. Yet, empirical evidence remains mixed, partly due to [...]

What Predictive Brains Inherit: An Evolutionary Account of Cognition

Leonel Gómez-Sena

Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Life Sciences

Predictive and Bayesian frameworks explain how organisms weigh expectation against evidence, but not where the ingredients come from - what counts as a signal, what counts as a good outcome, which hypotheses and actions are available at all. We argue these are historical products, not formal assumptions, and hypothesise how they were built. Cognition is chained together by conditional necessity: [...]

Overcoming limitations in selection guidelines for state-of-nature metrics in corporate assessments

Katia Sanchez-Ortiz, Benjamin Stimpson, Ashley H.Y. Bang, et al.

Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Life Sciences

The development and adoption of frameworks to help organisations understand, monitor, and disclose their biodiversity risks and impacts have accelerated due to Target 15 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Organisations are increasingly expected not only to measure their biodiversity pressures and responses, but also to demonstrate whether their actions lead to negative or [...]

Increase, decrease, or both: A systematic review of mosquito population response to floods

Tobias Röspel, Daniele Da Re, Damien Delforge, et al.

Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Parasitic Diseases, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Virus Diseases

Floods are increasing in frequency and severity under the ongoing climate change and are widely reported to alter mosquito population dynamics. However, the direction, magnitude, and consistency of this effect across mosquito species and flood contexts remain poorly studied. This systematic review synthesizes empirical evidence on mosquito species population responses to disastrous flood events [...]

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