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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Variability, drivers, and utility of genetic diversity-area relationships in terrestrial vertebrates

Chloé Schmidt, Sean M. Hoban, Deborah M. Leigh, et al.

Published: 2025-04-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences

Maintaining genetic diversity within and among populations is critical for conservation and a prominent goal of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. However, direct estimates of genetic diversity are unavailable for most species, and time and resources are insufficient to fill these substantial data gaps and meet conservation target timelines. Robust, proxy-based predictions of [...]

A systems perspective: How social-ecological networks can improve our understanding and management of biological invasions

Fiona Sophia Rickowski, Florian Ruland, Örjan Bodin, et al.

Published: 2025-04-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability

Reversing biodiversity loss and the sustainability crisis requires approaches that explicitly consider human-nature interdependencies. Social-ecological networks (SENs), which incorporate social and ecological actors and entities as well as their interactions, are such an approach. SENs have been applied to a range of complex issues, such as sustainable resource use, management of ecosystem [...]

Pharmacophagy in Insects: Ecological and Evolutionary Perspectives on the Non-Nutritional Use of Plant Specialized Metabolites

Pragya Singh, Caroline Müller

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, [...]

Beyond sex differences in mean: meta-analysis of differences in skewness, kurtosis, and correlation

Pietro Pollo, Szymon Marian Drobniak, Hamed Haselimashhadi, et al.

Published: 2025-03-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Biological differences between males and females are pervasive. Researchers often focus on sex differences in mean or, occasionally, in variation, albeit other measures can be useful for biomedical and biological research. For instance, differences in skewness (asymmetry of a distribution), kurtosis (heaviness of a distribution’s tails), and correlation (relationship between two variables) might [...]

Dynamic range models improve the near-term forecast for a marine species on the move

Alexa Fredston, Daniel Ovando, Lucas da Cunha Godoy, et al.

Published: 2025-03-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Population dynamic models are widely used to predict demography. However, they have rarely been extended to biogeographical applications despite widespread calls to do so. We developed a process-based dynamic range model (DRM) that estimated demographic rates and the effects of the environment on demographic rates to forecast species range shifts in response to temperature change. As a proof of [...]

Mapping the potential risk of coronavirus spillovers in South and Southeast Asia

Ralph Sedricke Lapuz, Ada Chornelia, Alice Hughes

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 [...]

Studying Individuality in Behavioural Ecology: Overcoming Epistemic Challenges

Rose Trappes, Alkistis Elliott-Graves, Marie I. Kaiser

Published: 2025-03-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy

Behavioural ecologists have recently begun to study individuality, that is, individual differences and uniqueness in phenotypic traits and in ecological relations. However, individuality is an unusual object of research. Using an ethnographic case study of individuality research in behavioural ecology, we analyse concerns that behavioural ecologists express about their ability to study [...]

Are tropical ant and termite assemblages along a forest recovery gradient habitat or dispersal limited?

Nina Grella, David A. Donoso, Jörg Müller, et al.

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 [...]

Variation in successional niche turnover of multiple taxa in a recovering tropical rainforest

Edith Villa-Galaviz, Gunnar Brehm, Santiago F. Burneo, et al.

Published: 2025-03-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Understanding the niche turnover of ecological communities is fundamental for advancing successional theory and effective restoration. However, since niche preferences are known for a few taxa, ecosystem succession is only partially understood. To fill this gap, using a null model approach, we determined the niche optimal within eighteen ecological communities (bacteria, animals, and plants) [...]

Recovery of phylogenetic diversity and phylogenetic structure in trees and animals along a chronosequence of tropical forest regeneration

Sebastián Escobar, Juan Ernesto Guevara-Andino, Nico Blüthgen, et al.

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 [...]

Quantifying macro-evolutionary patterns of trait mean and variance with phylogenetic location-scale models

Shinichi Nakagawa, Ayumi Mizuno, Coralie Williams, et al.

Published: 2025-03-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

Understanding how both the mean (location) and variance (scale) of traits differ among species and lineages is fundamental to unveiling macroevolutionary patterns. Yet, traditional phylogenetic comparative methods primarily focus on modelling mean trait values, often overlooking variability and heteroscedasticity that can provide critical insights into evolutionary dynamics. Here, we introduce [...]

Responses to climate change – insights and limitations from herbaceous plant model systems

Nicholas John Kooyers, Jill T Anderson, Amy L Angert, et al.

Published: 2025-03-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Sciences

Herbaceous plant species have been the focus of extensive, long-term research into climate change responses, but there has been little effort to synthesize results and predicted outlooks from different model species. We summarize research on climate change responses for eight intensively-studied herbaceous plant species. We establish generalities across species, examine limitations, interrogate [...]

Inbreeding and high developmental temperatures affect cognition and boldness in guppies (Poecilia reticulata)

Ivan M Vinogradov, Chenke Zang, Md Mahmud-Al-Hasan, et al.

Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Inbreeding impairs the cognitive abilities of humans, but its impact on cognition in other animals is poorly studied. For example, environmental stress (e.g. food limitation and extreme temperatures) often amplifies inbreeding depression in morphological traits, but whether cognition is similarly affected is unclear. We, therefore, tested if a higher temperature (30°C versus 26°C) during [...]

Paternity analysis reveals sexual selection on cognitive performance in mosquitofish

Ivan M Vinogradov, Rebecca J Fox, Claudia Fichtel, et al.

Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

In many animal species, cognitive abilities are under strong natural selection because decisions about foraging, habitat choice and predator avoidance affect fecundity and survival. But how has sexual selection, which is usually stronger on males than females, shaped the evolution of cognitive abilities that influence success when competing for mates or fertilizations? We aimed to investigate [...]

Alike but still different: coexistence of four raptor species explained by breeding niche overlap

Kai-Philipp Gladow, Jonas Beck, Patrick Benjamin Langthaler, et al.

Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

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