Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Taxonomic uncertainty: causes, consequences, and metrics
Published: 2025-03-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Taxonomic uncertainty is prevalent across many biological groups. Yet it remains overlooked in ecology, evolution, and conservation research, leading to potential misinterpretations of biodiversity patterns. Here, we synthesize the recent literature to define taxonomic uncertainty, examine its root causes and consequences, and present key metrics for its quantification. We argue that species [...]
How to reduce sampling error in species population monitoring: from theory to methods
Published: 2025-03-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Progress towards national and international targets to halt and reverse declines in species’ abundances will be assessed using Multispecies Indicators (MSIs). A distinction must be drawn between two MSIs. One is the ideal, but unobserved, MSI that would have been estimated had all species and sites within the scope of the target been sampled. The other is the empirical MSI estimated from the [...]
Quantitative metabarcoding reveals the effects of ecological factors and invasive species on functional diversity of freshwater insects
Published: 2025-03-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aquatic insects represent the majority of freshwater biodiversity, yet they are less studied than other taxa. Responses of aquatic communities to stressors are rarely assessed and are usually measured in terms of taxonomic richness derived from presence-absence data, despite certain mechanisms that may cause a reduction in the biomass of certain species, without causing their disappearance. The [...]
Recovery of phylogenetic diversity and phylogenetic structure in trees and animals along a chronosequence of tropical forest regeneration
Published: 2025-03-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Tropical forests are highly threatened habitats with the capacity to recover after disturbance. Integrating phylogenies in the study of forest recovery provides key information on the evolutionary relationships of communities through succession, and also serves as a proxy of their functional trait diversity and resilience capacity. We used phylogenetic and community data for trees and animal [...]
Leaf litter Decomposition dynamics across a Recovering Tropical Forest in the lowland Ecuadorian Chocó
Published: 2025-03-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Litter decomposition by arthropods, microbes, and fungi is a key ecosystem process in tropical forests, yet its response to forest disturbance and recovery remains poorly understood. To investigate decomposition dynamics across forest succession, we conducted an experiment in the Ecuadorian lowland Chocó (Esmeraldas) using a chronosequence approach. We deployed above- (AG) and belowground (BG) [...]
Quantifying macro-evolutionary patterns of trait mean and variance with phylogenetic location-scale models
Published: 2025-03-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Understanding how both the mean (location) and variance (scale) of traits differ among species and lineages is fundamental to unveiling macroevolutionary patterns. Yet, traditional phylogenetic comparative methods primarily focus on modelling mean trait values, often overlooking variability and heteroscedasticity that can provide critical insights into evolutionary dynamics. Here, we introduce [...]
Social tethers: density-dependent social tethers inhibit fitness
Published: 2025-03-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Putative mechanisms affecting fitness that underlie why animals occupy a particular place are often in tension. A tension amplified in social animals, where individuals are often not free to make independent habitat selection or foraging decisions. The ideal free distribution (IFD) is a density-dependent emergent property describing how individuals should distribute themselves to maximize fitness [...]
Inbreeding and high developmental temperatures affect cognition and boldness in guppies (Poecilia reticulata)
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Inbreeding impairs the cognitive abilities of humans, but its impact on cognition in other animals is poorly studied. For example, environmental stress (e.g. food limitation and extreme temperatures) often amplifies inbreeding depression in morphological traits, but whether cognition is similarly affected is unclear. We, therefore, tested if a higher temperature (30°C versus 26°C) during [...]
Paternity analysis reveals sexual selection on cognitive performance in mosquitofish
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In many animal species, cognitive abilities are under strong natural selection because decisions about foraging, habitat choice and predator avoidance affect fecundity and survival. But how has sexual selection, which is usually stronger on males than females, shaped the evolution of cognitive abilities that influence success when competing for mates or fertilizations? We aimed to investigate [...]
Gene flow and vertical stratification of pollination in the bat-pollinated liana species Marcgravia longifolia
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Pollen dispersal is a key driver of gene flow in plant populations, shaping their spatial genetic structure (SGS). In tropical forests, plant-pollinator interactions vary across vertical strata due to differences in microclimate, resource availability, and foraging behavior. Bats, an important tropical pollinator group, have been observed to exhibit vertical stratification in their foraging [...]
Alike but still different: coexistence of four raptor species explained by breeding niche overlap
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how species competing for similar resources coexist and influence each other has been, and still is, one of the big questions of community ecology. This question has often been tackled by comparing ecological niches of species pairs, although usually more than just two species compete for the same resources. We analysed the niche overlap of the breeding niche of four raptorial bird [...]
Late Pleistocene faunal community patterns disrupted by Holocene human impacts
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Paleobiology
We analysed fossil mammal assemblages from over 350 Late Pleistocene and Holocene sites worldwide to test whether human activities, such as agriculture, domestication and intensified land use, restructured global patterns of mammal co-occurrence. Using presence-absence data, we contrasted a novel iterative ‘chase clustering’ method, which is compositionally driven, against a traditional spatially [...]
Anomaly detection in metabarcoding amplicon reads using an LSTM-CNN deep neural network ensemble (MetAnoDe)
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Metabarcoding has emerged as a critical tool in ecology and other scientific disciplines, facilitating species identification in diverse samples for biodiversity monitoring, community and microbiome analysis, dietary studies, and understanding species interactions. However, challenges arise from errors and artifacts introduced during laboratory processes such as PCR and sequencing. Manual [...]
Moth communities are more diverse in the understory than in the canopy of a tropical lowland rainforest in NW Ecuador
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Tropical rainforests are the most species-rich terrestrial habitats and provide distinct niches for specialization and speciation, in part due to their vertical stratification. Stratification is observed in many insect orders as a result of abiotic factors, resource availability, and insect behavior. Here, we investigate the stratification of five clades of Lepidoptera: Erebidae-Arctiinae, [...]
How to Balance Conceptual Unity and Plurality: The Case of the Individualized Niche Concept
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences
Many philosophical discussions about biological concepts have focused on arguments for conceptual pluralism or monism, an approach that threatens to obscure the nuances of conceptual structure. We characterize the structure of the individualized niche concept based on the results of a qualitative empirical study we conducted within an interdisciplinary, biological research center. Our findings [...]