Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Marine subsidies, spatial heterogeneity, and territoriality drive trophic ecology in desert predators
Published: 2026-07-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Allochthonous (including marine) subsidies can have far-reaching effects on recipient ecosystems. By altering local resource availability, the combined effects of these subsidies and landscape heterogeneity can structure consumer diets, shape communities and influence ecosystem dynamics. 2. We examined how marine subsidies, landscape heterogeneity, and territoriality drive resource use in [...]
From Scalable Biodiversity Measurement to Credible Biodiversity Metrics
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Business, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Economics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistical Models, Sustainability, Technology and Innovation
Governments struggle to develop effective policies to counter the decline of species and ecosystems. An obstacle to command-and-control and incentive-based mechanisms is that biodiversity is costly to measure, creating an information asymmetry in which firms and governments are incentivised to withhold information on adverse impacts. Using a principal-agent model, we show that credible reporting [...]
Sniffing for fungi: Use of a conservation dog uncovers high regional truffle diversity
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Hypogeous aromatic fungi (‘truffles’) contribute significantly to overall fungal diversity but are difficult to find using traditional survey methods because they fruit underground, leading to under-documentation and a lack of understanding of truffle ecology. Truffles evolved to emit strong aromatic compounds to attract mycophagists for spore dispersal, a trait that culinary truffle harvesters [...]
Threat intensification reshapes trait-response relationships in birds and mammals
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Predicting which species are most at risk of extinction, and by which threats, is central to effective biodiversity management (1). Trait-based frameworks, linking species traits to extinction risk, are increasingly used to predict global biodiversity trends, with applications from species-specific prioritisations (2) to estimations of global diversity loss (3). However, despite the strong [...]
From a review to the field: Alternative coping styles under urbanisation
Published: 2026-07-06
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Endocrinology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physiology, Population Biology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Zoology
Under human-induced rapid environmental changes, behavioural and physiological responses of organisms are key to maintain homeostasis and minimise fitness loss. Both responses can be integrated, into among-individual correlations forming stress-coping styles or syndromes (SCS). Such SCS emerge from genetic correlations or adaptive trade-offs. In the context of environmental challenges, more [...]
Rodenticides now ubiquitous in wildlife of Italian landscapes
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
Second Generation Anticoagulant Rodenticides (SGARs) are used to control synantropic rodents and therefore also affect non-target wildlife. However, no study tested for their presence across a whole assemblage of wildlife, limiting our understanding of their overall circulation and exposure pathways. We tested for SGARs in a large sample of terrestrial mammals (n = 403) and birds (n = 189), that [...]
Genome-wide strengthening of evolutionary constraint across the volvocine multicellularity gradient
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics
The evolutionary cost of maintaining somatic cell populations has been hypothesised to drive proteome-wide strengthening of constraint on coding sequence at the origin of multicellularity. Prior work on the volvocine clade has reported lower d_N/d_S in colonial than in unicellular relatives on 55 chloroplast genes (Hu et al. 2019) and on 105 nuclear single-copy orthogroups across colonial species [...]
Technology should support, not sideline, locally driven conservation and restoration monitoring
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies
The choice of how to monitor conservation and restoration is not solely technical – it shapes which outcomes are valued, whose priorities define success, where resources flow, and who benefits. The shift toward tech-based monitoring, driven by demand for scalable metrics, risks incomplete ecological understanding, sidelining Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) from data ownership and [...]
Bridging nutritional geometry and network ecology to quantify the robustness of nutritional networks
Published: 2026-07-01
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Nutrition, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Understanding the robustness and resilience of ecological networks is key to managing ecosystems and mitigating biodiversity loss. Simple models of network robustness simulate species losses across ecological networks but lack physiological realism, asserting that species persist if they interact with another organism. This neglects the nutritional consequences of resource loss and nutrition as a [...]
Species diversity reduces risk in tropical forest restoration: a portfolio effect across heterogeneous sites
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Assisted restoration is essential for recovering degraded tropical forests. Biodiversity-stability theory predicts that functionally diverse communities should produce more reliable, predictable outcomes than monocultures, but broad-scale field experiments in tropical restoration are scarce. We established 120 plots spanning five planting treatments (two monocultures – of a fast-growing [...]
Variable patterns of local adaptation along an elevation gradient in a host-pathogen interaction
Published: 2026-06-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The strength of biotic interactions is hypothesized to decrease with elevation, yet it remains unclear whether this decline results in weaker selection at higher elevations. Further, it is not known if varying ecological interactions along elevation gradients affect the patterns of local adaptation between hosts and pathogens. Here, we experimentally test whether the direction and strength of [...]
Best analytical practices for estimating consumer reliance on basal food sources using bulk stable isotopes
Published: 2026-06-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Bulk stable isotopes have been utilised by ecologists for decades to trace the assimilation of basal food sources across trophic positions. However, there is a lack of guidance on the post-laboratory analytical workflow, leading to inconsistencies in how isotopic data are processed and interpreted. 2. We provide a comprehensive description of this necessary post-laboratory analytical [...]
Avian Population Genomics: Latest Findings and Future Prospects
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Birds are one of the most recognizable and diverse groups of organisms on Earth. This group has played an important role in many fields, including the development of methods in behavioral ecology and evolutionary theory. The use of population genomics took off following the increased accessibility of high-throughput sequencing across taxa. Several features of bird genomes make them particularly [...]
Natural history models of bird–building collisions
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Building collisions kill an estimated 1.28–5.19 billion birds annually in North America, making them the second leading cause of human-related avian mortality. Yet the behavioral and ecological drivers of collisions remain difficult to disentangle, as most knowledge derives from carcass surveys rather than direct observations. Here, we propose a conceptual framework that synthesizes four natural [...]
Choosing the Response Matrix: Generalised Linear Latent Variable Models for Multivariate Ecology and Evolution
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Multivariate responses are central to ecology and evolutionary biology, but their covariance is often difficult to model and interpret. Generalised linear latent variable models (GLLVMs) provide a parsimonious way to represent covariance among many responses using a smaller number of latent variables. They are widely used for Site X Species data in joint species distribution modelling and [...]