Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Long-term fitness effects of the early-life environment in a wild bird population
Published: 2025-04-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Environmental conditions and experiences during development can have long-term fitness consequences, including a reduction of adulthood survival and reproduction. These long-term fitness consequences may play an important role in shaping the evolution of life history. We tested two hypotheses on the long-term fitness effects of the developmental environment – the silver spoon hypothesis and the [...]
Pharmacophagy in Insects: Ecological and Evolutionary Perspectives on the Non-Nutritional Use of Plant Specialized Metabolites
Published: 2025-04-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Herbivorous insects can interact with plants in ways that go beyond nutrition, with plant specialized (secondary) metabolites (PSMs) mediating complex non-nutritional relationships. While PSMs often function as anti-herbivore defenses, many insects have evolved strategies to counteract and even exploit these compounds, using them for purposes such as their own defense against antagonists, [...]
Cryptic chemoautotrophic and methanotrophic processes complicate the use of carbon stable isotopes in rivers
Published: 2025-03-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
The use of carbon stable isotopes has contributed to many important discoveries regarding the base of consumer production in freshwater ecosystems. There is increasing recognition for the prevalence of anoxic conditions and the contributions of methane-derived carbon to freshwater food webs, highlighting the potential for methanotrophy and chemoautotrophy to complicate interpretations of δ13C [...]
Environmental heterogeneity mediates plant diversity and ecosystem stability in mountain ecosystems of the Mediterranean Andes
Published: 2025-03-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Globally, mountains are highly diverse ecosystems that serve as natural laboratories for testing fundamental ecological theories, while also providing vital ecosystem services. The biodiversity of these ecosystems is largely attributed to their complex topography, which creates gradients of elevation and environmental heterogeneity. These gradients in turn influence the maintenance of ecosystem [...]
Non-native plant legacies: site-dependent effects on deadwood fungal community species and functions
Published: 2025-03-28
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
1) The introduction of non-native species has consequences for ecosystem functions including deadwood decay. Non-native deadwood is a novel substrate for consumers, such as fungi, which drive large portions of carbon cycling, but their response to a novel substrate may depend on their local communities and surrounding environmental conditions. 2) We quantified decomposition rates, chemical [...]
Coarse-scale effects of land cover and fragmentation on Pyrodiversity
Published: 2025-03-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fire plays a crucial role in shaping ecosystem functions at multiple spatial and temporal scales. While traditional studies on fire regimes focus on central tendencies of fire attributes, such as average fire frequency, size, and seasonality, recent research highlights the importance of pyrodiversity as a critical ecological factor. Pyrodiversity reflects the variability in fire attributes across [...]
Mapping the potential risk of coronavirus spillovers in South and Southeast Asia
Published: 2025-03-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, Life Sciences, Public Health
Bats harbor approximately a third of known mammal viruses, including recent coronaviruses that caused pandemics. As spillover risk increases due to habitat loss and fragmentation, utilizing a OneHealth approach, we identified potential zoonotic spillover and pandemic risk hotspots in South and Southeast Asia. We used a model that estimates the risk of infectious disease emergence by incorporating [...]
Are tropical ant and termite assemblages along a forest recovery gradient habitat or dispersal limited?
Published: 2025-03-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Regenerating forests comprise a significant proportion of forest ecosystems in the tropics. While we are beginning to understand assembly mechanisms of tree communities after anthropogenic disturbances, those of animal communities are still poorly understood. It has been shown that locally established ant communities clearly assemble along gradients of forest recovery from active agriculture over [...]
Illustrated catalogue and preliminary phylogeny of 330 species of Arctiinae moth species from the Chocó rainforest in NW Ecuador: most species are undescribed
Published: 2025-03-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Tropical rain forests are the most species rich terrestrial habitats on Earth, but their insect diversity is understudied, and it is unclear how many species are already scientifically described. A model group to study description patterns are tiger moths (Erebidae: Arctiinae), a species-rich moth clade that comprises subtaxa that differ considerably in appearance. We inventoried Arctiinae moths [...]
LEPY: A Python-Based Pipeline for Automated Morphological Trait Analysis of Lepidoptera Images
Published: 2025-03-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. We present LEPY, a Python-based pipeline for automating the extraction and analysis of morphological traits, including structural and colour properties, from mounted Lepidoptera specimens. It uses a U-Net neural network for image segmentation and a scale bar for precise measurements. LEPY is designed to be easy and reproducible, ensuring efficient and consistent analysis of large Lepidoptera [...]
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 [...]
A fundamental theory of actual error for species population monitoring
Published: 2025-03-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Progress towards many national and international targets to halt and reverse declines of species populations (abundances) will be measured against Multispecies Biodiversity Indicators (MSIs). Like any sample-based estimator, MSIs approximate some real-world quantity (the estimand), and the difference between the two is the ‘actual’ or realised statistical error. We propose a general estimator and [...]
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) [...]