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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences

Socioecology and the role of scramble competition

Andreas Berghänel, Sarah Marshall, Friederike Range

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology

Ecological explanations for social organization and behavior are central to behavioral ecology. Unfortunately, the continuing mismatch between theoretical predictions and some empirical data led to increasingly complex hypotheses with numerous factors, raising doubts about their predictive value or even falsifiability. Moreover, several taxon-specific socioecological hypotheses have been [...]

Historical legacies of spatial and temporal climate exposure on thermal physiology shape butterfly vulnerability to recent climate change

Sarah E Diamond, Carmen da Silva

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Few observations are more indelible in ecology than widespread variation in the spatial and temporal occurrence of species. Although the mechanistic underpinnings of such variation are likely multifarious, temperature is argued to be a key driver. Understanding how temperature shapes species ranges and seasonal activity not only provides insights into historical biogeographic patterns, but also [...]

Which web to invade? Argyrodine kleptoparasites differentiate among architecturally different host webs

Ingi Agnarsson, Fi-Niaina Ramahefarisonc, Heiða Hlín Matthíasdóttir, et al.

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences

Kleptoparasitism, the theft of resources from another organism, is a survival strategy found across the animal kingdom. Many argyrodinae cobweb spiders (Theridiidae) are obligatory kleptoparasites that have largely abandoned web building, relying instead on webs of larger hosts. Theory predicts, and limited prior research indicates, that kleptoparasites are not randomly distributed among host [...]

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

Energetics drive emergent ecosystem processes, shaping behavior and population dynamics in response to environmental conditions. While energy budget models can be used to effectively link resource dynamics to fitness outcomes, they often lack empirical grounding for energy allocation under resource constraints. Here, we introduce the Pattern-Informed Energetics (PIE) framework, which leverages [...]

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 [...]

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