Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Beneath the Pavement: Understanding mycorrhizal fungi in urban ecosystems and the path forward
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Studies, Human Ecology, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Urban expansion is reshaping ecosystems worldwide, yet the responses of mycorrhizal fungi—key mediators of plant–soil interactions—remain poorly understood. In this review, we synthesize current knowledge on the environmental and ecological factors shaping mycorrhizal fungal diversity, distribution, and function in cities. We highlight how greenspace and landscape features—including plant [...]
Stranding-Based Demographic Inference in Marine Mammals: Best Practices for Extracting Vital Rates Despite Compound Sampling Bias
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Strandings records provide the only demographic data source for many marine mammal species. Yet they may be heavily biased. Every carcass passes through sequential filtering: mortality cause, oceanographic drift, decomposition, detection, and sampling. Each stage distorts age-specific signals. This creates a fundamental paradox: strandings are essential yet appear unreliable for demographic [...]
Overstating trophic cascade strength following large carnivore restoration in Yellowstone: A comment on Painter et al. (2025)
Published: 2025-11-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Painter et al. (2025) claim that large-carnivore recovery in Yellowstone National Park has produced a strong trophic cascade compared to other systems, citing a 152 fold increase in aspen sapling density and widespread recruitment of new trees. We show that these conclusions substantially overstate the cascade’s strength because of key methodological and interpretive flaws. First, Painter et al. [...]
Ecosystem dynamics in dune heathlands: spatial and temporal effects of environmental drivers on the vegetation
Published: 2025-11-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Pin-point cover data from 81 Danish dune heathland sites collected over 16 years were analyzed to quantify the effects of key environmental drivers on vegetation dynamics. A spatio-temporal structural equation model within a Bayesian hierarchical framework was used to assess the influence of nitrogen deposition, soil pH, soil C–N ratio, soil type, precipitation, and grazing. The species [...]
Parental care at the molecular level: the metabolic division of labour between parents and offspring
Published: 2025-11-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Parental care during offspring development has traditionally been viewed as a balance between cooperation and conflict. Offspring are imagined to be too helpless to find resources, or build protection, or generate warmth themselves. According to this view, the only work carried out by the offspring is through diverse acts of supplication for these vital resources. These are the traits, therefore, [...]
European beech reproduction is resilient to drought, including the 2003, 2018, and 2022 extremes
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Climate change is intensifying drought stress in temperate forests, but its effects on tree reproduction, central to forest regeneration and migration capability, remain poorly understood. In mast-seeding species such as European beech (\textit{Fagus sylvatica}), reproduction is regulated by temperature cues rather than current-year resource availability, raising questions about drought [...]
Eye lens isotope tag reveal migration as a driver of Japanese sardine synchrony
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding population fluctuations of broadly distributed marine fishes remains difficult, partly because they often consist of cryptic mixtures of individuals originating from geographically distinct nurseries that experience different environment pressures. However, resolving these spatiotemporally changing mixing processes had been challenging as conventional techniques are highly resource- [...]
Identifying genomic loci under selection in a widespread Bradyrhizobium, across Australian ecosystems using landscape genomics
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is reshaping soil environments, intensifying selective pressures on microbial communities that drive essential ecosystem processes. Understanding how nitrogen-fixing rhizobia adapt to environmental variation is critical for predicting ecosystem responses to global change. Here, we used redundancy analysis (RDA) to identify genomic loci associated with environmental gradients across [...]
The sleeping giant needs coffee: overlooked areas for the integration of plant ecophysiology and evolutionary biology
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Interpretations of evolutionary outcomes are limited without incorporation of physiological ecology; and ecophysiological interpretations would benefit from incorporating evolutionary perspectives. Although there has been a rise of studies in the last 20 years between these fields, evolutionary studies that incorporate plant physiology have largely focused on the same traits (i.e., flowering [...]
A coordinated biobank alliance for the zoological and conservation community
Published: 2025-10-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
With dramatic advancements in biological data generation, genetic rescue and reproductive technologies, and inter-institutional coordination of care across entire animal populations, zoos, aquariums, and their collaborators are uniquely positioned to lead population-wide research benefiting animal wellbeing and species survival. However, procedural and inter-institutional barriers make it [...]
Decomposing social interactions: a statistical method for estimating social impact and social responsiveness
Published: 2025-10-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Social interactions mediate the phenotypic expression of fitness-relevant traits. The expression of such labile social traits includes three distinct components: an individual's mean trait value (direct effect), its social responsiveness, and its social impact (indirect effects). Traditional methods, such as variance-partitioning or trait-based models, usually only partition individual variation [...]
Animal dispersal costs are not universal
Published: 2025-10-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Dispersal is a keystone process shaping ecological and evolutionary dynamics, often assumed to be inherently costly. We synthesized 696 effect sizes from 206 studies across 148 animal species, spanning all continents and ecosystems, to test this assumption. Contrary to long-standing dogma, we found no overall effect of dispersal on fitness (mean effect size: -0.03, 95% CIs: -0.09 to 0.03). No [...]
Mangrove Restoration and Blue Carbon Potential in Odisha: Bridging Ecosystem Services with Climate Resilience
Published: 2025-10-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangrove ecosystems along Odisha’s coastline act as frontline defenses against climate volatility, shielding communities and supporting rich biodiversity. This study synthesizes 25 years of research (2000–2025) and employs the InVEST model to assess ecological restoration outcomes, including carbon capture, water quality gains, and future climate risks. Field data indicate sequestration rates of [...]
sitetool: an application for field site selection and evaluation
Published: 2025-10-27
Subjects: Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Field studies are fundamental to ecological research, yet many studies rely on unspecified or convenience-based methods for site selection, potentially introducing bias that can compromise research results. Remote-sensing data provides a quantitative way to evaluate potential sites without expensive pilot visits, however, interacting with spatial data can be computationally complex. We present an [...]
Unravelling drivers of forest biodiversity: Contrasting effects of mean environmental conditions, environmental heterogeneity and landscape context
Published: 2025-10-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Understanding how biodiversity varies under different environmental conditions is one of the central aims of ecology. Mean environmental conditions and heterogeneity have an effect on biodiversity. Increased heterogeneity is generally associated with increased diversity, but mean conditions tend to have a stronger influence. Conditions on site are embedded into a landscape context, which adds [...]