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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences

Minimal viable sound systems for language evolution

Adriano R Lameira, Steven Moran

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Physiology, Systems Biology

Human vocal gamut covers 3000 unique speech sounds comprising the world’s languages, with each new speaker having to learn the sounds of its new language. Since large, expandable repertoires are facilitated by vocal learning, this capacity has long been considered a prerequisite for speech and language evolution. The postulation of a vocal learning and repertoire size ceiling has, however, never [...]

Advancing Amazonian botanical knowledge: a detailed ecological characterization of an open ombrophile forest, southwest Amazonian Brazil

Bruno Umbelino, Juliana Stropp, Ingrid Mendes-Silva, et al.

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences

Biodiversity inventories present excellent opportunities for ecological investigations and the classification of different threats to the community, nonetheless these applications are not frequently employed. Our main objective was to determine the tree and palm community within a one-hectare areas, also exploring the association between functional attributes and the projected threat of category [...]

A novel method to estimate actual infrastructure-induced mortality by integrating sampling biases

Guillermo Gómez Peña, Marcello D'Amico, Carlos Rodríguez, et al.

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences

1. Human infrastructures are among the most impactful threads to wildlife. While estimates exist on the number of animals killed by these structures over a given period, such estimates typically do no account for several detection biases. Consequently, true mortality rates may be severely underestimated, as well as their impact on populations and species. 2. We present a hierarchical Bayesian [...]

Pattern-informed energetics: Energy allocation modeling for predicting trait variation and population persistence

Cara A. Gallagher, Viktoriia Radchuk, Melanie Dammhahn, et al.

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology

Ecosystem processes emerge from complex interactions between environmental conditions, individual behavior, fitness, and population dynamics. A central mechanism driving these relationships is energetics, yet many energy budget models lack an empirical foundation for how organisms allocate energy when resources are limited. Without accounting for real-world variability in energy use, these models [...]

AmphiTherm: a comprehensive database of amphibian thermal tolerance and preference

Patrice Pottier, Rachel Rui Ying Oh, Pietro Pollo, et al.

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Thermal traits are crucial to our understanding of the ecology and physiology of ectothermic animals. While rising global temperatures have increasingly pushed research towards the study of upper thermal limits, lower thermal limits and thermal preferences are essential for defining the thermal niche of ectotherms. Through a systematic review of the literature in seven languages, we expanded an [...]

The Physical and Chemical Basis for Temperature Effects on Metabolic Rate and Biological Processes – A Brief History

Mark Ritchie, Jose Ignacio Arroyo

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Life Sciences

IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Java Transitional

Frida Sidik, Dhira Saputra, Yaya Ihya Ulumuddin, et al.

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Life Sciences

Mangroves of the Java Transitional is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Southern Java and Cocos-Keeling/Christmas Island. The Java Transitional mangrove province mapped extent in 2020 was 159.9 km2, representing 0.1% of the global mangrove area. The biota is characterized by 34 species of true mangroves. Java [...]

IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the North Brazil Shelf

Marcus E. B. Fernandes, Christophe Proisy, Temitope D.T. Oyedotun, et al.

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Life Sciences

Mangroves of the North Brazil Shelf (NBS) are a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Amazonia, Guianan, Northeastern Brazil, and the Southern Caribbean. The NBS mangrove province had a mapped extent in 2020 of 13204.0 km2, representing 9.0% of the global mangrove area. The biota is characterized by Rhizophora [...]

Challenges and opportunities when assessing exposure of financial investments to ecosystem regime shifts

André Pinto da Silva, Nielja Knecht, Romain Thomas, et al.

Published: 2025-03-06
Subjects: Life Sciences

Financial investments will be affected by ecological regime shifts through the loss of natural resources underpinning dependencies of most economic sectors. We suggest one possible pathway to link industry and products to the likelihood of ecological regime shifts. The challenges and opportunities are discussed at each step, including datasets, methods and metrics. To this end, we identify recent [...]

Individual variation in perceived density and its impacts on the realization of ecological niches

Ane Liv Berthelsen, Barbara A. Caspers, Nayden Chakarov, et al.

Published: 2025-03-06
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Organisms gain information about their local environment using different senses. Variation in both reception and assessment of stimuli leads to differences among individuals in their perception of environments. Here, we highlight the importance of acknowledging and investigating such individual differences by focusing on perceived density, the individual’s assessment of local density. We [...]

Monitoring ecological corridors for nature and people

Annika Keeley, Jamie Faselt, Gabriel Oppler, et al.

Published: 2025-03-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences

Ecological corridors designed to maintain ecological connectivity between protected and conserved areas is a conservation strategy that is increasingly embraced around the world. Monitoring corridor effectiveness is essential to gauge progress toward connectivity conservation objectives; it also fosters learning among diverse rightsholders and interested parties. In particular, monitoring how [...]

Mining for Species, Locations, Habitats, and Ecosystems from Scientific Papers in Invasion Biology: A Large-Scale Exploratory Study with Large Language Models

Jennifer D'Souza, Zachary M. Laubach, Tarek Al Mustafa, et al.

Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences

This paper presents an exploratory study that harnesses the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to mine key ecological entities from invasion biology literature. Specifically, we focus on extracting species names, their locations, associated habitats, and ecosystems, information that is critical for understanding species spread, predicting future invasions, and informing conservation [...]

Indirect effects dominate ecosystem service losses in response to agricultural intensification

Agustin Vitali, Darren M. Evans, Fredric M. Windsor, et al.

Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Feeding a growing human population while preventing biodiversity loss is a major challenge. Land conversion impacts multiple ecosystem services (ESs), including food production and biodiversity-dependent services; yet, the role of indirect effects on ESs within this context, such as parasitoids boosting crop yield by controlling herbivores, remains poorly understood. Using species-network data [...]

Tracheal chambers as a key innovation for high frequency emission in bat echolocation.

Nicolas Louis Michel Brualla, Laura AB Wilson, Khizar Hayat, et al.

Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology

Key innovations play a crucial role in driving biodiversity and facilitating evolutionary success by enabling organisms to adapt to various ecological niches through the diversification of phenotypic traits. These innovations have been observed in different vertebrate clades, such as mammals evolving hypsodonty to graze on contemporary grasses and bats with the evolution of echolocation, [...]

MIGRACIÓN DE UN AVE COSTERA: LA GAVIOTA GARUMA (Leucophaeus modestus) Y SU DINÁMICA OCUPACIONAL EN EL PARQUE NACIONAL PAN DE AZÚCAR

Werther Marcoleta, Cristobal Saez, Liesbeth van den Brink

Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences

La gaviota garuma es un ave costera migratoria austral que se distribuye por la costa oeste de Sudamérica, y que nidifica en el interior del desierto de Atacama, Chile. En el Parque Nacional Pan de Azúcar, la gaviota garuma es el ave más abundante. Durante 2 años monitoreamos mensualmente los individuos presentes en la costa. Se identificaron más gaviotas garumas en verano del primer año que en [...]

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