Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Predator Experience Shapes Behaviour: Comparing Stone Wētā (Hemideina maori) Populations With and Without Weka (Gallirallus australis hectori)
Published: 2026-06-10
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Antipredator behaviour reflects both evolutionary history and individual experience, yet how populations respond to changes in predator exposure remains poorly understood, particularly for large invertebrates. We examined antipredator behaviour in two populations of stone wētā (Hemideina maori Pictet & Saussure, 1891) inhabiting weka-free Mou Tapu and nearby Mou Waho, where weka (Gallirallus [...]
Mapping microclimate temperatures in open ecosystems using UAVs: a comparison between thermal, correlative, and mechanistic approaches
Published: 2026-06-09
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring
Open terrestrial ecosystems exhibit pronounced fine scale thermal heterogeneity, yet spatially continuous microclimate data at biologically relevant heights and scales remain scarce. Here, we evaluate three unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV) informed approaches for mapping microclimate temperatures, including land surface temperature (LST) and near surface air temperature (T13cm), in an open [...]
Intertidal Exposure Modulates Time-Integrated Heat Tolerance of the Eastern Oyster Crassostrea virginica
Published: 2026-06-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The rise of unprecedented heatwaves globally has caused an increase in mass mortality events, motivating the need for accurate predictions of population declines. Predicting organismal function under fluctuating thermal regimes is a central challenge in thermal biology, particularly in intertidal systems where organisms experience rapid shifts between submerged and aerial exposure. Here, we [...]
Modelling habitat selection using tracking data from central place foraging species: A practical guide for ecologists
Published: 2026-06-04
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Behavior and Ethology, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
The study of habitat selection has long been at the heart of ecological research and is critical to deciphering the mechanisms that govern species’ responses to global change. This is particularly important for central place foraging species, whose ability to adapt to shifting environmental conditions and anthropogenic disturbance is limited by persistent attachment to a fixed site. Recent [...]
Problems of geometry, sampling, and scale in gridded biodiversity data, and proposed solutions
Published: 2026-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Grids, and gridded biodiversity data such as regional or country-level atlases, play a prominent role in ecology, particularly in the study of spatial patterns of species occupancy, geographic ranges, biodiversity, and their drivers and temporal dynamics. However, managing, exploring, and analyzing data in grids comes with problems. Here, we review the problems with gridded data, and the existing [...]
Computable Nature Dependency in a Watershed Knowledge Graph
Published: 2026-06-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Systems Biology
Resolving nature-related financial risk and watershed resilience requires a representational shift from opaque, aggregate indices to auditable, mechanistic pathways. Current natural-capital workflows often succumb to an "epistemic collapse", where granular ecological interactions are erased in favor of sector-level proxies or spatial heatmaps that lack a downstream asset trace. Here, we present a [...]
Predicting substrate size at a watershed scale to inform conservation planning for a declining salmonid species
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Biology, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Good quality spawning habitat is critical for fish embryo development, survival, and overall population productivity. Appropriate riverbed substrate size is particularly important for riverine-spawning salmonids but the availability of suitable substrate may vary across a watershed. Predicting substrate size at watershed extents may therefore be critical to inform management and conservation of [...]
Between categories and continua: growth-form organization in global leaf economics spectrum space
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The leaf economics spectrum (LES) describes a globally coordinated trade-off between acquisitive and conservative plant resource-use strategies, yet how major plant growth forms are organized within multidimensional LES space and the extent to which these patterns reflect evolutionary history remain incompletely resolved. Using species-level trait data from the TRY Plant Trait Database, we [...]
Motivations and organizational models for private sector biodiversity engagement
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Private sector engagement is increasingly recognized as critical for addressing global biodiversity loss, yet the recent IPBES global assessment of business and biodiversity confirms that current economic conditions remain largely incompatible with the transformative change required. We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with business leaders and sustainability practitioners across multiple [...]
Gradual development and chance beget individuality
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
Behaviors – and thus behavioral individuality – rarely emerge fully formed but are instead built gradually through development, shaped by processes involving learning, skill formation, and experience. Prevailing theory in behavioral ecology, however, has largely focused on static equilibrium outcomes where behaviors are analyzed only as fully formed traits, often neglecting development. Here, we [...]
Evaluating the potential of molecular dietary analysis of predators for the detection of emerging plant pests
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Agriculture, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biosecurity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Genetics, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Monitoring plant pests is crucial for maximising yields across agricultural and forest production systems, but also for the mitigation of invasive species spread. Traditional monitoring methods, such as mass trapping and direct observation, scale poorly and introduce latency between collection, detection and response. Since many plant pests are frequently consumed by predators, molecular dietary [...]
Deterministic by design: causal inference challenges for ‘biodiversity change’ syntheses
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Understanding biodiversity change over space and time is a central goal of ecology. A common approach to asking why biodiversity is changing over time, is to collate biodiversity time series from multiple sites and undertake a two-step analysis: First, site-level estimates of ‘biodiversity change’ are calculated. Second, those change estimates are regressed on putative environmental drivers, such [...]
A simple demographic explanation for the evolution of the dietary restriction response and its ecological relevance
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Considerable life history plasticity is observed in response to variation in food availability and composition. This is perhaps best known in the context of dietary restriction, which consistently induces lower reproduction and higher survival across taxa, with nutritional geometry studies further demonstrating the importance of food composition as well as amount. Although there is a huge amount [...]
Do the benefits of hybridization outweigh the costs under conditions of global change?
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Global change is predicted to facilitate hybridization but whether the hybrid populations persist and shape biodiversity remains unknown. At the grey zone, before speciation is completed, hybridization is likely leading to simultaneous costs and benefits for hybrid fitness. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs depends on the environment, as hybrid fitness, and potential incompatibilities, can [...]
Sex-reversed males are morphologically similar but have lower testosterone levels compared to sex-concordant males in the agile frog
Published: 2026-05-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Environment-induced sex reversal – the mismatch between genetic and phenotypic sex caused by external conditions during early development – is increasingly documented in ectothermic vertebrates, yet its fitness-related consequences in natural populations remain poorly tested. To address this gap, we compared sex-reversed XX males and sex-concordant XY phenotypic males in agile frogs (Rana [...]