Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
How many ways are there to be a phage?
Published: 2026-08-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Virology
The search for predictive rules for how microbiomes assemble and function rarely include their most abundant members: phages. Nearly a century of phage research has yielded few ecological principles for the impacts of phages within microbial communities – sequencing surveys resolve phage presence but not phage activity, while mechanistic studies of relatively few model phages provide insights [...]
Measure what the coarsening removes: a precondition for interpreting spatial-resolution comparisons in ecological models
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Ecological models increasingly use "scale-free" downscaled climate surfaces, assuming finer resolution predicts local response better. Even a comparison that varies resolution alone can fail to test it: over a small extent, coarsening barely changes the predictors. I provide a diagnostic detecting this before a model is fitted. Though the variance decomposition is classical, calibrating it [...]
Candidozyma auris (Candida auris) as a harbinger of novel fungal pathogens
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Medical Microbiology, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Pathogenic Microbiology
Mammals are protected from fungal pathogens by two evolutionary pillars: adaptive immunity and elevated body temperature. Anthropogenic climate change is eroding this thermal barrier, while a concurrent decline in human basal body temperature accelerates convergence from both directions. The emergence of Candidozyma auris (Candida auris), a thermotolerant, multidrug-resistant pathogen that arose [...]
Increase, decrease, or both: A systematic review of mosquito population response to floods
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Parasitic Diseases, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Virus Diseases
Floods are increasing in frequency and severity under the ongoing climate change and are widely reported to alter mosquito population dynamics. However, the direction, magnitude, and consistency of this effect across mosquito species and flood contexts remain poorly studied. This systematic review synthesizes empirical evidence on mosquito species population responses to disastrous flood events [...]
Five First Records from a Half-Century Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta) Communal Nesting Aggregation: Predation, Mortality, Nesting Phenology, and a Decade of Nest Protection
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
We describe a half-century communal nesting aggregation of the Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta), a species of conservation concern, at a single restored prairie–savanna site along a tributary of the Namekagon River in northwest Wisconsin, USA, monitored since the 1970s and protected with successive structures since 2015, and we report five natural-history findings from the site that are, to our [...]
The Defensive Repertoire of New World Coral Snakes: Evolution and Natural History
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
The defensive repertoire of New World coral snakes is diverse, but its evolutionary history remains poorly understood. We compiled 280 records of 11 defensive behaviors across 85 species of Micrurus and one species of Micruroides from the literature and contributions by researchers, naturalists, and wildlife photographers. Fifty-seven records represented behaviors not previously documented for [...]
iPhone Lidar Can Accurately Capture Fine-Scale Understorey Vegetation Structure
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Complex vegetation structure increases ecosystem resilience, but fine-scale understorey vegetation is often overlooked in monitoring protocols despite subtle variation impacting overall diversity. iPhone lidar has placed cost effective and portable remote sensing technology in the pockets of researchers, farmers, practitioners, and citizens worldwide to conduct continuous monitoring and improve [...]
Conspecific Gamete Precedence in Speciation: History, Evidence, and a Research Roadmap
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Barriers to hybridization can act between gamete release and fertilisation. When an egg donor has simultaneous access to conspecific and heterospecific pollen or sperm, competitive interactions can bias fertilisation towards conspecific gametes, producing conspecific gamete precedence (CGP). Although such biases were first reported more than 250 years ago, CGP remains poorly integrated into the [...]
Linking movement to mortality: a framework for predicting anthropogenic mortality hotspots in wide-ranging animals
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Human activities and their impacts are a major source of mortality for wide-ranging animals, yet conservation efforts often remain reactive because it is difficult to predict where mortality is most likely to occur. Approaches to understand and reduce wildlife mortality typically rely on coarse-scale associations between mortality events and landscape features, limiting their ability to identify [...]
Contextual evidence for categorising interactions and guiding their discovery
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Ecological interactions shape community dynamics and stability, yet many go unrecorded. Link prediction methods attempt to tackle incomplete knowledge, but predictions are only conjectures, and validating them all in the field is neither feasible nor desirable. Furthermore, interactions differ in the action needed for their detection. Validation therefore must be guided by ecological and [...]
Sleep elasticity: accessory, useful and vital components of a single state
Published: 2026-08-19
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Systems Biology
Sleep is universal, homeostatically defended and apparently costly, and for half a century this combination has been read as evidence of a vital, conserved function still awaiting identification. The search has not converged. Instead, it has accumulated a dozen candidate functions, each defensible but none commanding assent. I argue that the difficulty lies with the question rather than with the [...]
Non-native plants homogenize global urban flora
Published: 2026-08-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Urban areas serve as hubs for non-native plant introductions, but the extent to which these introductions have homogenized city floras globally remains unexplored. We analyzed species inventories from 553 cities across six continents and show that non-native plants increase mean pairwise floristic similarity by ~50%, from a Jaccard index of 0.11 for native species alone to 0.16 when non-natives [...]
Wolf–Deer Camera-trap Detections Across Wisconsin’s Statewide Wolf Range (2018–2025): A Temporary Increase in Wolves Following Deer After the 2021 Wolf Harvest, Displacement Effects by Habitat Zone, and Avoidance of People Across Co-occurring Species
Published: 2026-08-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Two prior analyses of wolf-enriched extracts of the Snapshot Wisconsin camera network — one county, then five northwestern counties — showed that gray wolves (Canis lupus) tended to arrive at cameras shortly after white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), that they arrived after antlered bucks more often than the bucks’ numbers would predict, and that deer returned to a site more slowly after a [...]
IUCN Red List Threatened Bird Classification from Citizen-Science Images using Fine-Tuned CNN Features and a Hierarchical Lightweight Classifier
Published: 2026-08-18
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ornithology
To prevent bird strikes at wind farms, an approaching protected bird must be identified so that the turbine can be halted before a collision. We present a bird-species classification module intended for that real-time, low-power edge setting: a hierarchical system assigning IUCN Red List categories to in-the-wild citizen-science bird images, combining a ResNet50 feature extractor fine-tuned on a [...]
Toward a standardized workflow for pre-processing large vegetation-plot databases
Published: 2026-08-17
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences
Large vegetation-plot databases have opened unprecedented opportunities for investigating vegetation patterns and processes across large spatial and temporal scales. However, such databases are typically created by combining pre-existing smaller databases or datasets that often used different standards and protocols, leading to data inconsistencies (e.g., different taxonomy and nomenclature) and [...]