Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Revealing the unknown world of the endangered Lear's macaw using GPS-tracking data: identification of critical habitats for conservation
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Understanding space use and home range is essential for the conservation planning of threatened species as it helps to assess the suitability, extent, and placement of conservation areas that are imperative for species survival and protection. The Endangered Lear’s macaw (Anodorhynchus leari), a highly mobile frugivore, feeding specialist and endemic to Brazil’s Caatinga dry forest, faces ongoing [...]
High-resolution range mapping of mycorrhizal fungal species reveals systematic biases in their protection
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies
Mycorrhizal fungi are essential to ecosystem functioning but have been overlooked in conservation agendas due to data limitations and a historical focus on plants and animals. We present the first global, species-level assessment of the area-based conservation of mycorrhizal fungi. Using 16.5 million site-by-taxon presence–absence records, we created high-resolution range maps for 189 arbuscular [...]
Frequent shifts in pollination strategy are decoupled from diversification in the terrestrial orchids
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Pollinator attraction strategies are central to orchid reproductive biology and have long been hypothesised to accelerate speciation rates, particularly through specialised coevolutionary interactions. However, most macroevolutionary evidence comes from studies of individual genera or tribes, leaving broad-scale patterns unresolved. Here, we reconstruct the evolution of pollination strategy in [...]
Modelling complex habitat use for threatened bat species decision-making in landscapes with competing priorities
Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Zoology
Species distribution models (SDMs) provide valuable information to aid conservation decisions, particularly in landscapes where economic and biodiversity priorities compete. Generating SDMs for species that rely on discrete habitat types for different activities (e.g. roosting or foraging) can be challenging, and result in outputs that are not appropriately tailored for end use. We collated [...]
Long-read sequencing for biodiversity analyses - a comprehensive guide
Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
DNA-based monitoring of biodiversity has revolutionised our ability to describe communities and rapidly assess anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. Currently established molecular methods for biomonitoring rely heavily on classic metabarcoding utilising short reads, mostly through Illumina data. However, increasingly more studies use long-read sequencing technologies, such as Oxford Nanopore [...]
Fast evolving flowers drive cactus diversification
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The rise of biodiversity is shaped by variation in diversification rates. Across the Tree of Life, numerous forces are thought to influence these rates, including the evolution of adaptive traits, climate change, and interactions with other organisms. In the flowering plants, a longstanding hypothesis favoured by Darwin suggests that floral evolution is a driving force for plant diversity. [...]
Herbarium specimens reveal long-term decline in pollination services since in the 1970s
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Anthropogenic change has resulted in pollinator decline and altered plant-pollinator interactions. This may drive widespread declines in pollination and reproductive success of plants, yet few datasets allow us to track changes in pollination services over time. Herbaria provide a unique opportunity to assess pollination services across broad spatial and temporal scales, and the associated [...]
Sydney Phylogenetics Workshop: Lessons from the past 15 years
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phylogenetic analysis forms an important component of research in the life sciences, enabling the study of evolutionary relationships, timescales, patterns, and processes. Phylogenetic trees are used in a wide variety of research fields, including molecular ecology, taxonomy and systematics, conservation genetics, and microbiology. Accordingly, there is a strong demand for accessible training in [...]
Changes in pollen production, pollen heteromorphism and ovule production with increased selfing in Viola arvensis
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Plant Biology, Population Biology
Embryos are largely understudied in conservation physiology
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology
Understanding how animals respond to environmental stressors across their life cycle is essential for predicting species’ vulnerability to climate change. Here, we systematically reviewed the literature to quantify the variation in research effort on different life stages in the field of conservation physiology. Specifically, we reviewed experimental studies measuring physiological and [...]
Moving from the Dilution Effect to Dilution Landscapes: Effects of Natural Vegetation Cover and Fragmentation on Host-parasite Eco-evolutionary Dynamics
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The conversion and fragmentation of natural landscapes are key drivers of biodiversity loss and the erosion of ecosystem services, including disease regulation. Although habitat degradation is linked to higher zoonotic disease risk, the mechanisms by which landscape structure shapes host-parasite eco-evolutionary dynamics remain poorly understood. Here, we combine a spatially explicit [...]
Causal interpretations can be based on mechanistic knowledge
Published: 2025-08-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. There exists a long-standing disconnect between statistical and mechanistic approaches to the development of causal understanding. Statistical approaches, which have dominated the literature, have focused on the need to obtain perfectly unbiased estimates of causal effects often using either experimental, quasi-experimental, or other methods. Mechanistic approaches have instead focused on [...]
Finding Inter-species Associations on Large Citizen Science Datasets
Published: 2025-08-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
“But I can’t preregister my research”: Improving the reproducibility and transparency of ecology and conservation with adaptive preregistration for model-based research
Published: 2025-08-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
1. Preregistration is an open-science practice which aims to improve research transparency and mitigate questionable research practices, like cherry-picking results. It helps protect against cognitive biases, like hindsight bias, that can influence how study outcomes are interpreted. There has been little uptake of preregistration in ecology and conservation, arguably because existing [...]
Infection profiles in a wild rat–protozoan network are shaped by host traits and environmental factors
Published: 2025-08-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Pathogenic Microbiology
Heterogeneity in parasite infection among hosts shapes transmission dynamics and spillover risk to other host species but remains poorly understood in natural systems. We applied network-based stochastic block modeling and machine learning to a uniquely rich dataset to identify and predict protozoan infection profiles in introduced black rats (Rattus rattus) sampled along an environmental [...]