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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Facing the heat: behavioral and molecular underpinnings of climate hardiness in bumblebees

Nastacia Leigh Goodwin, Z Yan Wang

Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Behavioral Neurobiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Climate change heralds an era of increased heat waves, with an estimated 20-30 additional high heat days per year. While climate change is upon us, we still have little understanding of the organismal impacts of high heat and how to combat them. Insects, due to their short generation times and their sensitive ecological requirements, offer a powerful model for studying rapid physiological and [...]

Designing Multi-Modal Ecosystem Monitoring Technologies: A Network of Networks Approach

Christopher Benjamin Anderson

Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Software Engineering

The central promise of ecosystem monitoring technologies — like bioacoustic, camera trap, citizen science, eDNA, and satellite data — is to reveal changes in the structure and composition of the Earth’s ecological systems to facilitate timely and effective conservation action. Following the evolution and maturation of these technology systems, the fusion of multimodal observation systems — where [...]

Improving landscape fire frequency estimates by integrating public land fire data and satellite imagery

Felicity Eloise Charles, April E Reside, Patrick T Moss, et al.

Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Background Contemporary fire regimes are changing rapidly, and effective fire management requires knowledge of fire history, often derived from satellite imagery. Satellites, however, are not well suited to detecting low intensity fires, meaning fire history data are often inaccurate. Aims We aimed to improve satellite fire frequency estimates by incorporating data from fire history on public [...]

Leveraging large language models for ecological interpretation using an eBird chatbot case study

Elise Gallois, Arianna Salili-James, Sanson T. S. Poon, et al.

Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

1. The anthropocene presents significant challenges for global biodiversity, public health, and long-term ecosystem stability. The wealth of publicly available near-real-time ecology and climate data can be used to monitor these challenges and allow practitioners to develop mitigation strategies. 2. There is untapped potential to apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to quantitative ecological and [...]

Short reproductive periods dominate mast seeding across diverse tree species

Katarzyna Kondrat, Jakub Szymkowiak, Andrew Hacket-Pain, et al.

Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Biology

Mast seeding, synchronous and highly variable reproduction among perennial plants, profoundly impacts ecosystem dynamics and species interactions. However, the extent of periodicity in mast seeding, defined as cyclical but not strictly regular intervals between reproduction, remains poorly understood, including how it varies across and within species. Here, we used autoregressive analyses on seed [...]

A method of predicting ecological community structure

John Alroy

Published: 2025-04-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

1. Species inventories are the most basic form of ecological data. They provide information both about species richness and about community assembly rules. Fitting species abundance distribution models yields such information. Previous distributions either fit the data badly, assume that all species are equivalent, or ignore sampling processes. A distribution called the compound [...]

BOLDistilled: Comprehensive but compact DNA barcode reference libraries

Sean William John Prosser, Robin M Floyd, Ken A Thompson, et al.

Published: 2025-04-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Advances in DNA sequencing technology have stimulated the rapid uptake of protocols—such as eDNA analysis and metabarcoding—that infer the species composition of environmental samples from DNA sequences. DNA barcode reference libraries play a critical role in the interpretation of sequences gathered through such protocols, but many lack adequate taxonomic curation, include redundant records, do [...]

A users guide for understanding reptile and amphibian hydroregulation and climate change impacts

Nicholas C Wu, Rodolfo O Anderson, Amael Borzee, et al.

Published: 2025-04-18
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Human impacts on ecosystems have intensified water variability for terrestrial life, thus challenging the maintenance of water balance, or hydroregulation. The accelerated development and accessibility of technologies and computational models over the past decade have enabled researchers to predict changes in animal hydroregulation and environmental water with greater spatial and temporal [...]

Long-term monitoring strategies for ecological reclamation programmes using spatially balanced rotating panel designs

Michael Finn Curran, Blair L Robertson, Jasmine Allison, et al.

Published: 2025-04-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

1. Environmental monitoring programmes associated with ecological reclamation are critical to various stakeholder groups and important for regulatory compliance, to assess site performance, and to inform decision management. As logistical constraints are common, strategies for sampling multiple locations or large areas over time are likely to improve monitoring programmes. Rotating panel designs [...]

Low levels of extrapair paternity in the long-lived colonial Alpine swift (Tachymarptis melba)

Christoph Meier, Giulia Masoero, Maria Burger, et al.

Published: 2025-04-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

It has been suggested that a high aerial lifestyle makes it difficult for males to limit mating opportunities for their partners. This would explain the particularly high levels of extra-pair paternity (EPP) observed in swallows and swifts (Hirundinidae, Passeriformes). Here, we investigated EPP in the Alpine swift (Tachymarptis melba), whose aerial lifestyle is similar to that of the [...]

Delineating freshwater fish biogeographic regions in the Philippine archipelago

Brian Wade Jamandre, Nico Jose Leander, Rodulf Anthony Balisco, et al.

Published: 2025-04-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

The Philippines, a biodiversity hotspot with a complex geological history, presents an ideal setting to study freshwater fish biogeography in archipelagos. Despite its ecological significance, analyses of freshwater fish distribution patterns across the archipelago remain lacking. This study addresses this knowledge gap by delineating native freshwater fish biogeographic regions in the [...]

Spatially varying population indices

Jonas Knape

Published: 2025-04-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Population Biology

Large scale monitoring is fundamental for reliably tracking the fate of animal populations under changing environments and land-use practices. A common application of large scale population monitoring data is to produce indices of temporal change in species abundances, which are used in environmental policy assessments of species and biodiversity statuses. For index estimation, spatio-temporal [...]

Speciation in ants: Unlocking ant diversity to study speciation (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

Patrick Heidbreder, Patrick Krapf, Marit Kuijt, et al.

Published: 2025-04-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Ants are among the most abundant terrestrial animals and play key roles in ecosystems across the globe. Their taxonomic and ecological diversity makes them a prime taxon for contributing to our understanding of the patterns and processes of speciation.However, studies often do not explicitly link their results to the broader framework of speciation and reproductive isolation. Here we combine [...]

Plant genomic variation and its implications for proposed EU NGT legislation

Alan H. Schulman, Frank Hartung, Marinus J.M. Smulders, et al.

Published: 2025-04-09
Subjects: Biotechnology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

The European Commission proposal for New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) of July 2023 specifies that NGT1 plants, which are considered equivalent to conventional plants, may differ from the recipient or parental plant by no more than 20 insertions, which cannot be longer than 20 bp; deletions can be of any size and number. Here, we examine the proposed 20/20 NGT1 limit against the background of the [...]

The Missing Environmental Impacts in Invasive Species Cost Assessments –Insights from an InvaCost-based regional review

Nicholas Patrick Moran, Lu-Yi Wang, Anca M Hanea, et al.

Published: 2025-04-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Accounting for the costs incurred due to biological invasions is important for informing invasive species management policies, and understanding and mitigating future losses. InvaCost, a living review and massive database of cost estimates, is a valuable open science resource that can support informed policy and management of invasive species and has since been the basis of many regional and [...]

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