Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Weather conditions are systematically associated with long-range nonroutine movements in a large scavenger
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Zoology
Movement data are valuable for the conservation of Old World vultures, as these move across large distances and experience a wide range of threats. As vultures rely on soaring flight, the interplay of solar radiation, as well as wind direction and strength, is crucial for both short- and long-range movements. However, no study explored the extent to which weather conditions can predict long-range [...]
The SORTEE Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Open data and code are crucial to increasing transparency and reproducibility, and in building trust in scientific research. However, despite an increasing number of journals in ecology and evolutionary biology mandating for data and code to be archived alongside published articles, the amount and quality of archived data and code, and subsequent reproducibility of results, has remained [...]
From Shorelines to Social Media: Mixed-Methods Insights into Urban Fishing Practices, Policy Gaps and Culture in the Digital Age
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recreational and subsistence fishing are globally significant forms of marine resource use, contributing to food security, cultural identity, and social well-being across diverse coastal communities. Yet these non-commercial sectors are often overlooked in formal fisheries monitoring and governance. In California’s San Francisco Bay Area, non-commercial fishers represent a wide range of [...]
Revisiting evolution at the rear edge
Published: 2025-08-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Rear-edge populations occur at species’ warmer range limits, with many still occupying glacial refugia. They offer valuable insights into evolution under changing climates yet are underused as models. From two decades of research, we identify three equally likely evolutionary patterns in rear edges: high levels of genetic diversity and differentiation, elevated genetic drift, and strong local [...]
Strain-specific thermal acclimation, but little evidence of transgenerational plasticity, in an asexual crustacean
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Transgenerational plasticity has been suggested as a means for species to succeed in rapidly changing environments, such as increased temperature brought on by climate change. However, the evidence for this phenomenon in animals is mixed. The freshwater crustacean Daphnia magna displays transgenerational plasticity in response to environmental cues such as the presence of predators or food, but [...]
Opportunities for Cities to Cultivate Biodiversity
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Policy, Environmental Studies, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Plant Sciences, Public Policy, Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration, Systems Biology, Urban Studies and Planning
Cities pose a major threat to global biodiversity in every sense of the word. Municipal leaders have opportunities to promote biodiversity efforts in their cities. Several studies have shown that managing resources with biodiversity in mind within cities is effective and benefits both human and non-human residents and visitors. Two major opportunities for biodiversity investment in urban areas [...]
Predictive Evolutionary Genomics: Principles, Validation, and Practice
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Population Biology
Contemporary evolution occurs on observable timescales, enabling prospective evolutionary forecasting with quantitative frameworks rather than only retrospective inference. We propose a unified probabilistic framework that integrates three approaches linked to detectability windows through time. Trait-based models use multivariate quantitative-genetic equations to project correlated phenotypic [...]
Progress toward sustainable management of marine crustacean fisheries
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Population Biology
Marine crustacean capture fisheries have been contributing increasingly more to global aquatic food production in recent decades, helping secure socioeconomic benefits. In the past decade the landings of marine crustaceans rose by more than 67% while expanding spatially and taxonomically, doubling their contribution to global fisheries landings. Although efforts to improve the data collection [...]
Trapper Citizen Science: an open-source camera trap platform for citizen science in wildlife research and management
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Computational Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Effective wildlife monitoring is essential for biodiversity conservation and sustainable management, particularly in the face of rapid environmental changes and human-wildlife interactions. Advances in camera trap technology and citizen science, here used to denote non-professional involvement in scientific research, irrespective of citizenship status, have revolutionized ecological data [...]
National-scale estimates of mammal species abundance in Italy for the Habitat Directive reporting
Published: 2025-08-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
This report describes the methodological frameworks developed in collaboration with ATIt ETS (https://www.mammiferi.org) to estimate the abundance of mammal populations at the scale of Italy for the species listed under Annexes II, IV, and V of the Habitats Directive. For each species, the estimation methodology was defined based on the availability and quality of data supplied by the individual [...]
Improving the temporal transferability of species distribution models under climate change by incorporating historical species-climate relationship
Published: 2025-08-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how species will respond to climate change is one of the current key challenges in ecology and nature conservation. The tempo-spatial variations of climate makes it more challenging to predict species responses to climate change across their entire ranges. Species distribution models have been widely used for identifying how species distributions respond to climatic drivers. Despite [...]
Trait shifts during range expansions: A meta-analysis
Published: 2025-08-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Populations undergoing range expansions often undergo phenotypic shifts at the leading edge. Understanding how traits change during range expansions could provide insight into predicting invasive species dynamics and responses to climate change. Theory predicts that edge populations should increase in dispersal capability and shift towards reproductive traits that maximize fecundity over [...]
An Evolutionary Hypothesis on the Persistence of Non-Coding DNA in Complex Genomes: The Passive Selfish DNA Model
Published: 2025-08-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Non-coding DNA constitutes the vast majority of eukaryotic genomes, yet its evolutionary role remains largely unresolved. This manuscript proposes a theoretical model in which non-coding DNA persists not due to functional utility, but as "passive selfish DNA"—elements that replicate by coexisting with coding sequences in vital genomes. Drawing analogies with endogenous retroviruses and vertically [...]
TADA! Simple guidelines to improve code sharing
Published: 2025-08-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Code sharing is important for transparency and facilitates computational reproducibility of published research. However, even as the number of journals that encourage or mandate code sharing continues to increase, the prevalence of open code remains low. Furthermore, even when shared, code is often non-functional, which hinders computational reproducibility. One reason for low levels of code [...]
Exploring the Integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Artificial Intelligence to Mitigate Human-Wildlife Conflict in Kerala, India
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Increasing human-wildlife conflict (HWC) in forest-fringe landscapes necessitates innovative and culturally acceptable mitigation strategies. This note proposes integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mitigate HWC in Kerala. The proposition aims to translate African rural traditional knowledge of using alarm calls of Guinea fowls (Numida meleagris) [...]