Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Light color and nutrient availability alter trophic transfer from algae to zooplankton
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Freshwater plankton communities experience both natural variation of light color and nutrient availability and shifts due to eutrophication and brownification. These changes can alter algal community structure, but whether variation of light color impacts trophic transfer from algae to zooplankton is unknown because most research ignores color and focuses on light intensity. We used microcosms [...]
Enhancing motivation to learn about the ocean through VR underwater field skills in a Higher Education setting
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly recognised as a tool for enhancing engagement and motivation in education. This is particularly true where access to experiential learning is limited, as is often the case in marine ecology courses. However, evaluations of the effectiveness of VR as a teaching and learning tool in higher education is limited. Here, we use the Explore experience developed by [...]
Elevating the importance of Risk of Bias assessment for ecology and evolution
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are key evidence synthesis methods informing research and policy. An assessment of the Risk of Bias (RoB) in included studies is normally considered an essential component of these. However, RoB assessment is rare in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), and tools from other fields are seldom adopted. To identify reasons for this limited uptake, we surveyed [...]
Comparing statistical methods for detecting climatic drivers of mast seeding
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Understanding the drivers of mast seeding is critical for predicting reproductive dynamics in perennial plants. Here, we evaluate the performance of four statistical methods for identifying weather-associated drivers of annual seed production, i.e, weather cues: climate sensitivity profile, P-spline regression, sliding window analysis, and peak signal detection. Using long-term seed production [...]
Avifaunal diversity in urban parks of Delhi is shaped by both anthropogenic and natural factors
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Urbanization leads to fragmentation and reduction of natural habitats which become islands of remnant biodiversity. As predicted by the Theory of Island Biogeography (TIB), fragment area and fragment isolation are major predictors of bird species richness in urban and rural habitats. This study is to understand patterns in avifaunal composition in select urban parks specifically in terms of area [...]
Characterising the structural complexity across major habitats of Tenerife, Spain
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences
Understanding biodiversity changes across ecosystems requires the consideration of various biodiversity dimensions, such as habitat structural complexity – the degree of heterogeneity in the distribution of plant material in three-dimensional space. Yet, its inclusion in long-term biodiversity monitoring on oceanic islands remains limited. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can be used to quantify [...]
Toxin resistance mechanisms span biological scales in the Royal Ground Snake (Colubridae: Erythrolamprus reginae)
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Molecular Biology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Systems Biology, Zoology
Exposure to multiple toxic compounds imposes diverse selective pressures, potentially leading to a toxin-resistant phenotype that operates across biological levels. There are several known toxin resistance mechanisms–such as behavioral avoidance, metabolic detoxification, and target-site insensitivity. However, most studies have been conducted with exposure to a single toxin or have focused on [...]
Genomic data confirms that mutation cannot restore genetic diversity lost through population bottlenecks
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Population Biology
Maintaining within-species genetic diversity is a critical goal of biodiversity conservation as it determines a species’ ability to adapt to environmental change. Without human intervention, isolated populations can only recover genetic diversity post-bottleneck through the accumulation of new mutations over evolutionary timescales. Using recent estimates of mutation rates from major genomic [...]
Historical and Potential Future Importance of Marine Megafauna Subsidies to Terrestrial Ecosystems
Published: 2025-06-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Marine megafauna exert tremendous influence on the structure and function of ocean ecosystems, yet mounting evidence shows that their ecological impacts also cross the land-sea interface and modify terrestrial ecosystem dynamics. Marine megafauna connect land and sea by serving as large, calorically-rich food sources for terrestrial consumers and by transferring marine-derived nutrients onto land [...]
Colorful birds face heightened extinction risk around the world
Published: 2025-06-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Ornithology
Many of the functional traits that mediate extinction risk across the tree life relate indirectly to a species’ ability to persist in a changing world. Yet, there are certain traits such as coloration that directly affect human interactions with wildlife. Here, we use an existing dataset of color metrics for 4334 passerine bird species combined with global functional trait data to determine [...]
The interplay between ecological networks drives host-plasmid community dynamics
Published: 2025-06-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Plasmids can accelerate host adaptation through horizontal gene transfer and are key members of microbial communities. Plasmid infection dynamics are potentially affected by the interplay between the structures of host-plasmid and plasmid-plasmid interactions. However, how the structures of these networks jointly affect plasmid transmission and community dynamics remains unstudied. We used an [...]
Systematic mapping and bibliometric analysis of meta-analyses on animal cognition
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Psychiatry and Psychology
Meta-analyses play an important role in empirically synthesising research and guiding future directions. The field of animal cognition is rapidly expanding, with both empirical and review papers increasing at a faster rate than those in the life sciences overall. However, the use of meta-analyses, their methodological rigour, and the geographic distribution of research activity remain unclear. We [...]
Relative High Fitness and Genome-wide Diversity May Facilitate Plastic and Active Foragers' Diversification
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Explaining the variation in diversification rates across the Tree of Life is an important challenge for evolutionary biologists. Growing evidence suggests that key innovations or historical contingency give rise to high diversification rates, but the genetic mechanisms through which this process may occur remain poorly investigated. Based on fitness landscapes, a high diversification is [...]
Seabird range contraction and dispersal under climate change
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Many marine ectotherms have historically adapted to local climate change by evolving smaller body sizes, reducing their energy demands in warmer waters but limiting their dispersal and speciation rate. Whether endothermic marine species respond similarly remains unclear, as temperature minimally affects their size diversity, and the drivers of their dispersal and speciation are poorly understood. [...]
Towards causal predictions of site-level treatment effects for applied ecology
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
With limited land and resources available to implement conservation actions, efforts must be effectively targeted to individual places. This demands predictions of how individual sites respond to alternative interventions. Meta-learner algorithms for predicting individual level treatment effects (ITEs) have been pioneered in marketing and medicine, but they have not been tested in ecology. We [...]