Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Data availability impacts the predictive accuracy of pressure-based biodiversity models
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Amidst the biodiversity crisis, there is high demand for spatially explicit biodiversity indicators. Global models that quantify impacts of human pressures provide important insights for conservation, but their accuracy in spatial projections has yet to be systematically tested. Here we evaluate this using a global dataset of 25,987 species inventories from 681 studies. We find that mixed models [...]
Cryptic Degradation in Urban Forests: Decoupled Collapse of Soil Methane Sink and Understory Regeneration
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Urban forests are typically assessed by canopy metrics, assuming that tree persistence indicates ecosystem health. We present evidence of "cryptic degradation" (a functional decoupling between canopy biomass and belowground processes) using 25 years of data from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES). We document two concurrent phenomena: (1) a 59% reduction in soil methane (CH4) uptake beginning [...]
Social structure in northern bottlenose whales: Stable relationships without stable groups
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Uncovering the drivers and function(s) of social relationships across a wide range of species is key to understanding the ecology and evolution of social behaviour. Northern bottlenose whales have been identified as a particularly important case study for social evolution. Unlike other large, toothed whale species which live in kin-based social units, northern bottlenose whales appear to form [...]
The Singularity at the Heart of Evolutionary Biology: Organismal Selection and the Thermodynamic Origin of Life
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The origin of the first organism presents as a fundamental discontinuity in evolutionary biology. While population‑centred theories of natural selection succeed when reproduction and heredity exist, they cannot explain life’s emergence from non‑living matter. Building on the conceptual framework of Organismal Selection, this work proposes a physical model in which the transition from lifeless [...]
A plain language review and guidance for modeling animal habitat-selection
Published: 2025-12-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Animal habitat selection is the process of how individual organisms disproportionately use habitat compared to what is available to them. Understanding habitat selection is important for the study of ecology and conservation. However, learning the foundations of making inference or prediction on animal habitat selection can be quite challenging. Foremost, the literature is large and highly [...]
Operationalising resilience-based management at scale: a meta-adaptive blueprint from the Great Barrier Reef Crown-of-Thorns Starfish Control Program
Published: 2025-12-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Resilience-based management (RBM) has been widely adopted as a future focused extension of adaptive management to address mounting climate change impacts on coral reef ecosystems, yet there are few demonstrated examples of RBM operating effectively at large spatial and institutional scales. The Crown-of-Thorns Starfish (COTS) Control Program on the Great Barrier Reef illustrates how RBM can be [...]
Coevolution of social network structure and life history in toothed whales
Published: 2025-12-18
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Marine Biology
Toothed whales offer a 34 million year-long natural experiment for the evolution of complex mammalian societies. However, quantitative comparative analyses of social structure in these species are lacking. Here, we draw on existing social network analyses to compare social structure across toothed whales. We consider published measures of two social network traits across all toothed whales: [...]
Moving Target(s): One Health at changing human-livestock-wildlife interfaces in tropical ecosystems
Published: 2025-12-18
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Food Science, Life Sciences, Systems Biology
One Health approaches currently conceptualized for Western landscapes require fundamental rethinking for tropics, where human-livestock-wildlife interfaces exist as variegated mosaics rather than discrete zones. This overview examines why tropical ecosystems involve (i) Human mobility patterns shifting continuously through rural-urban migration and globalization (ii) Livestock health [...]
Scale mismatches limit the efficacy of customary management
Published: 2025-12-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Indigenous lands are some of the most biodiverse areas in the world, providing protection for many species and spillover benefits for wider communities. However, these areas face increasing threats. Indigenous communities face many challenges in protecting and managing these lands, particularly in the form of power imbalances and spatial, temporal, and functional-conceptual mismatches. 2. [...]
Comparing mean species abundance and the biodiversity intactness index to guide robust biodiversity investment decisions
Published: 2025-12-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Mean species abundance (MSA) and the biodiversity intactness index (BII) are two leading biodiversity metrics used to quantify how species composition differs between a control site and an impacted site. Both are proposed for global biodiversity monitoring, are used by companies to create corporate biodiversity impact accounts, and are being considered by financial institutions seeking to [...]
Evolving on two fronts: Oak species and syngameons
Published: 2025-12-16
Subjects: Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
William ‘Bill’ Burger wrote in 1975, “I believe that the classical species-concept in Quercus defines a very real population system and that it evolves on two fronts. One is that of continuing to adapt to a niche that differs slightly from its close relations. The second is in sharing the broader evolutionary advances of these same close relations that together comprise the genetically [...]
Business as usual will commit biodiversity to genetic erosion: parallels from climate change for proactive conservation
Published: 2025-12-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Biodiversity and climate resilience are tightly linked. Genetic diversity enables species to adapt in a rapidly changing world, yet its loss (genetic erosion) remains the least visible dimension of the biodiversity crisis. Although climate science has long recognised that past emissions can lock in future climate impacts (“committed climate change”), the idea that biodiversity also faces future, [...]
A protocol for biodiversity-informed wildlife disease surveillance
Published: 2025-12-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences
Land use and climate change are increasing the risk of spillover of zoonotic disease into human populations. However, we lack actionable information about the prevalence of pathogens in wildlife populations for most of the globe, challenging our ability to implement strategies to prevent zoonoses. Even when this data exists, it has historically been sampled opportunistically and without guidance [...]
A One Health Sustainability framework for nature-based wellbeing
Published: 2025-12-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Mental and Social Health, Public Health
Human health benefits of nature are increasingly documented, yet the ecological conditions underpinning these benefits and the sustainability of nature-based interventions remain poorly measured. We introduce an integrated One Health Sustainability framework that links human health outcomes with ecological integrity, landscape pressures, and sustainability dimensions. This framework provides a [...]
R for marine ecologists: wrangling Earth System Model outputs
Published: 2025-12-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
This one-day, hands-on workshop introduces marine ecologists to the use and application of Earth System Model (ESM) outputs using R–a free, open-source programming language widely used in marine ecology. Designed for participants with basic or no prior experience in climate modeling, our workshop: 'R for marine ecologists: wrangling Earth System Model outputs' provides a comprehensive foundation [...]