Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
What's really happening on the Barro Colorado Island 50 ha forest plot?
Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Over the decades, Barro Colorado Island (BCI) has incubated major conceptual and empirical advances in ecology. For example, the theoretical zero-sum multinomial (ZSM), log series, and Poisson log normal (PLN) models have been used to describe abundance distributions and quantify diversity in the BCI 50 ha forest plot. 2. A new model called the compound exponential-geometric series (CEGS) [...]
Threatened Alpine and Subalpine Ecosystems of Australia: An IUCN Red List of Ecosystems Assessment Version 0.5
Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
DeepResearch_Eco: A Recursive AgenticWorkflow for Complex Scientific Question Answering in Ecology
Published: 2025-07-27
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
We introduce DeepResearch_Eco, a novel agentic LLM-based system for automated scientific synthesis that supports recursive, depth- and breadth-controlled exploration of original research questions—enhancing search diversity and nuance in the retrieval of relevant scientific literature. Unlike conventional retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, DeepResearch enables user-controllable synthesis [...]
The Marsupial Database: A comprehensive dataset on the ecology and life history of American and Australasian marsupials
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Marsupials are an important but typically neglected group of mammals that have been overlooked in many comparative analyses of vertebrate ecology and life-history evolution. In order to address this knowledge bias, we have developed The Marsupial Database. The Marsupial Database contains traits for a phylogenetically diverse set of 414 extant and recently extinct (last 200 years) species from all [...]
Physical and Migration Metrics of White Storks (Ciconia ciconia) and the influence that landfills play in their variation
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Zoology
1. White storks (Ciconia Ciconia) are a traditionally fully migratory species and their numbers in western Europe were decimated in the last century. Their numbers have since boomed and they have altered their migratory strategy to have become a partially migratory species. This change has been ascribed in large part to anthropogenic food subsidies, particularly in the form of landfill sites. 2. [...]
Assessing direct effects of insect change on insectivore populations in the United Kingdom
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
1. Declines in insect abundance are a cause for concern, with potential downstream impacts on the function of ecosystems. Insects are key food resources for insectivorous vertebrates, with evidence that declines in these species could be driven by changing insect abundance. 2. Quantifying the direct effect of insect abundance on vertebrate population dynamics is challenging especially at large [...]
Recruitment bottlenecks and reinforcing environmental degradation drive marsh collapse
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ecosystem collapse is often attributed to the absence of stress-tolerant species, yet many climate-stressed systems fail even when these species remain regionally present. This raises a critical, unresolved question: does collapse result from species pool depletion, or from failed recruitment? We addressed this by combining vegetation surveys and a three-year transplant experiment in sea level [...]
Location–scale models in ecology: heteroscedasticity in continuous, count and proportion data
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ecological data seldom meet the assumption of constant variance. Yet patterns of heteroscedasticity often reflect biologically meaningful variation, such as differences in plasticity or variable responses to environmental stresses. However, most studies model only the mean, treating variance as statistical noise. Here, we describe location–scale regression modeling, which estimates mean [...]
Six decades of losses and gains in alpha diversity of European plant communities
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Biodiversity change forecasts rely on long-term time series, but such data are often scarce in space and time. Here, we interpolated spatiotemporal changes in species richness using a novel machine learning method without requiring temporal replication at sites. Using 698,692 one-time survey vegetation plots, we estimated trends in vascular plant alpha diversity across Europe from 1960 to 2020 [...]
Long-term change in precipitation and its variability and consequences in a montane environment
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The climate at high altitudes is changing more rapidly than in many other areas, with a variety of consequences for montane flora and fauna. We analyze long-term weather records from Crested Butte (2703m, 1910- 2024) and Gothic (2921m, 1974 – 2024), Colorado, USA, in the West Elk Mountains. In Crested Butte, mean monthly precipitation in the growing season (May – September) can vary by over [...]
The Minimum Carbon Theory: A Physiological Basis for Species Coexistence
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how species coexist and why diversity varies across regions remains a central challenge in ecology. Although widely used theories such as niche theory, neutral theory, and modern coexistence theory have yielded key insights into coexistence and diversity, their reliance on abstract parameters lacking direct physiological grounding limits empirical validation and constrains [...]
A comprehensive dataset on pollinator diversity, visitation rates, individual-based traits, and pollination success across four plant species in an urban garden experiment
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
This dataset presents flower visitation frequency, pollinator richness, and direct measures of pollination success for four focal plant species from a field experiment in 24 home gardens in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. The home gardens were selected to vary independently in local flowering species richness and the proportion of impervious surface in a 500-m radius around the garden, a common [...]
Big bills, small changes: with few exceptions, Jungle crows show minor variation in bill morphology across their distribution
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Examinations of morphology can reveal a species' relationship with the environment and their evolutionary trajectory. Particularly pronounced difference can hint at specific selection pressures, and reveal hitherto unknown species. Cryptic species, with only subtle morphological differences, are widespread and ignoring them risks underestimating biodiversity and their threatened status. Recently [...]
Marine heatwave and keystone predator loss drive broad-scale decline and hinder recovery of a rocky intertidal kelp
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Human activities are increasingly driving the co-occurrence of multiple ecological stressors, resulting in interactive and cumulative impacts that can reshape ecosystem dynamics and accelerate population declines of climate-sensitive species. Here, we use over two decades of rocky intertidal monitoring across 17 sites spanning over 1,200 km of coastline to assess how two unprecedented stressors—a [...]
Discrepancies between wolf distribution estimates from opportunistic mortality records and probabilistic field-based surveys
Published: 2025-07-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences, Zoology
The gray wolf (Canis lupus) has expanded its distribution in Europe, where some countries implemented population monitoring schemes through structured surveys. However, increasing wolf populations has also resulted in a growing number of wolves being found dead each year. Although these opportunistic reports are promising for population monitoring, their accuracy in reflecting wolf distribution [...]