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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences

The role of touch in marine mammal sociality: a review and future directions

Ana Eguiguren, Sam Froman Walmsley, Laura Joan Feyrer, et al.

Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences

While social living has many advantages, it also has significant challenges associated with differences in individual interests, abilities, and intentions. Individuals in social species rely on diverse behaviours and signals across senses to mediate their relationships. In some species—particularly primates—touch plays a key role in establishing, affirming, and repairing social bonds. However, [...]

Impacts of carbon farming practices on biodiversity at the farm scale

Hanna Susi, Paula Thitz, Marleena Hagner, et al.

Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Life Sciences

1. Biodiversity loss from intensive agriculture poses a major threat to the long-term sustainability and resilience of food production systems. Sustainable land management practices, such as carbon farming, offer promising alternatives, but their biodiversity impacts and the most effective methods for detecting these impacts remain poorly understood. 2. We surveyed 19 farms in boreal Finland to [...]

Collectomics in plant biodiversity research - looking into the past to understand the present and shape the future

Solveig Franziska Bucher, Sebastian Gebauer, Jonas Grieb, et al.

Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Life Sciences

Global biodiversity is changing at unprecedented rates during the Anthropocene. Whereas current biodiversity patterns can be observed directly, information from the recent past is far less easily retrieved yet urgently needed to understand present observations and predict future developments. For plants, herbaria offer such a unique glimpse into the past. Evaluation of plant specimens allows [...]

Meta-CHANS: Linking Metacommunity Ecology with Coupled Human and Nature Systems to Foster Conservation Management

Zsófia Horváth, Sabine Wollrab, Sonja C Jähnig, et al.

Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Life Sciences

Spatial processes shape both ecological dynamics and human decision-making. Here, we propose a unifying framework – Meta-CHANS – that integrates metacommunity ecology into the concept of Coupled Human And Natural Systems (CHANS). We highlight how recent theoretical and methodological advances, especially in species distribution modeling and process inference, allow the identification of dominant [...]

Cellular Innovations and Diversity in the Lepidopteran Compound Eye

Wei Lu, Marcus R. Kronforst

Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics

Lepidoptera, having co-diversified with flowering plants and adapted to various diel niches, present a remarkable system for studying compound eye cell type diversity. Here we synthesize the latest research regarding lepidopteran eye evolution across different timescales, from species-level variation to family-level changes, and mechanistic levels, from broad anatomical variation to molecular [...]

Borealization of tundra ecosystems with climate and land-use change

Mariana Verdonen, Isabel C Barrio, Laura Barbero-Palacios, et al.

Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Life Sciences

As the colder regions of the planet warm, species are moving northward and upward from the boreal forest to the tundra biome, a process that has been referred to as borealization. Here, we examine the diverse uses of the term borealization and propose the concept of tundra borealization for terrestrial environments to specifically describe shifts in species composition from boreal to tundra [...]

Decoding Genomic Landscapes of Introgression

Xin Huang, Josef Hackl, Martin Kuhlwilm

Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Life Sciences

Genomic landscapes of introgression provide valuable information for how different evolutionary processes interact and leave signatures in genomes. The recent expansion of genomic datasets across diverse taxa, together with advances in methodological development, has created new opportunities to investigate the impact of introgression along individual genomes in various clades, making the precise [...]

Neighborhood habitat gains increase plant species richness in forest fragments

Kyle Rosenblad, Jon Sullivan

Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Life Sciences

Theory and indirect evidence suggest that when new habitat is added to a habitat fragment’s local landscape, or “neighborhood”, species richness in the fragment will increase. Although this hypothesis is frequently assumed, it has not yet been tested directly with longitudinal data. In a natural forest regeneration experiment on Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island, we use causal inference to show [...]

Ocean warming drives abrupt declines in fish productivity at global scale

Mathieu Pélissié, Vincent Devictor, Olaf Jensen, et al.

Published: 2025-05-22
Subjects: Life Sciences

Marine life is under multiple pressures, including climate change and overfishing. Environmental change and variability can threaten fishery sustainability, especially when it results in large, abrupt and persistent shifts in productivity of fish stocks. Reports of abrupt shifts in marine systems are not uncommon, but a global assessment of their occurrence and drivers is seriously lacking. Here, [...]

IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. Sandy Beaches & Dunes of the Gulf of Guinea North

Kwasi Appeaning Addo, Selasi Y. Avornyo, Philip-Neri Jayson-Quashigah, et al.

Published: 2025-05-22
Subjects: Life Sciences

The sandy beaches and dunes of the Gulf of Guinea North is a regional ecosystem subgroup along the West African coast. It had a mapped extent of 256 km² in 2022, with a width ranging from of 0.01 km to 1.02 km, and stretches over approximately 2481 km. This ecosystem subgroup extends along the shores of Benin, Togo, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Guinea Bissau. This [...]

IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. Sandy Beaches & Dunes of the West African Transition

Kwasi Appeaning Addo, Philip-Neri Jayson-Quashigah, Selasi Y. Avornyo, et al.

Published: 2025-05-22
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Abstract The ‘Sandy Beaches and Dunes of the West African Transition’ form a regional ecosystem subgroup along the West African coast. It had a mapped extent of 584 km² in 2022, with a width ranging from 0.012 km to 4.796 km, and stretching over approximately 1321 km. This ecosystem subgroup extends along the shores of Mauritania, The Gambia and Senegal. This ecosystem frequently experiences [...]

Revisiting the copepod diversity of Indian Sundarbans through estimation of carcasses

Debarati Sengupta, Danilo Calliari, Sourav Paul

Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Life Sciences

Diversity assessment of plankton traditionally considers species richness and abundance, overlooking the vital state of individuals (i.e., alive or dead). This study aimed to integrate the vital state of zooplankters into diversity indices, using the copepods of the Indian Sundarbans (IS) as an example community. It was hypothesized that when carcasses estimation (CE) is incorporated diversity [...]

Filling Monitoring Gaps for Data-deficient Species Using Annual Occupancy Predictions from Co-occurrence Models

Hyun Yong Chung, Dae Kyung Lee, John Losey

Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences

Fragmented surveys and limited monitoring exclude most invertebrate species from conservation policy. We present a framework that generates annual occupancy predictions using species distribution models (SDMs) to reconstruct missing trends—not to extrapolate trends, but to fill them in (the fill-in approach). Instead of filtering poor-data regions and years or relying on static environmental [...]

NextGeneration specimen digitization: The international herbarium community goes spectral!

Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Dawson M White, Natalie Iwanycki Ahlstrand, et al.

Published: 2025-05-20
Subjects: Life Sciences

1. Spectral reflectance measured from herbarium specimens represents a vast source of plant phenotypic and functional trait data. 2. The potential to capture data from specimens to enhance knowledge of plant function and taxon identification has inspired many laboratories worldwide to initiate next-generation spectral digitization from specimens. 3. Combining these datasets into a coordinated [...]

Multimodal data integration to model, predict, and understand changes in plant biodiversity: a systematic review

Emilce Soledad Matinez, Eva Luz Tejada-Gutiérrez, Albert Sorribas, et al.

Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Life Sciences

The integration of multimodal data to analyze, model, and predict changes in plant biodiversity is critical for addressing global conservation challenges. This systematic review examines the current landscape of plant biodiversity data, focusing on the identification, classification, and evaluation of key open-access data sources and integration methodologies. We highlight the strengths and [...]

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