Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Quantifying the probability of evolutionary rescue
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
While evolutionary rescue is now a well-established term, there are subtleties in precisely defining it and conceptual complications in quantifying its probability. In this Perspective, we pay special attention to three issues: 1) How do we know that a population would go extinct in the absence of evolution? 2) How do we determine the probability of rescue if persistence is possible in the [...]
Reconsidering interspecific co-occurrence of native and invasive plants in an anthropogenic riparian ecosystem
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Sciences
Invasive non-native plants are considered mostly though negative interactions, but are increasingly recognized as potential contributors to ecosystem functioning. By modifying microhabitats, resource availability and species interactions, non-natives plants may reshape and maintain the living conditions of native plant communities. We conducted an observational field study to quantify the [...]
On the Promise (and Practice) of Deep Comparative Methods: Expressivity, Limitations, and Design
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
Comparative biologists explain the diversity of organismal form and function by deciding which traits to measure and which evolutionary processes to model. These decisions make inference possible, but they also confine it to traits, relationships, and processes that can be specified a priori. Neural networks can expand this space, learning characters directly from complex observations and [...]
Building from biodiversity assessment to place-based conservation action across scales of information and governance.
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Scientific assessments of biodiversity and ecosystem services are challenged by the need to examine systemic drivers of change while maintaining support in a polarized political climate. Recent US national policy shifts that reduce federal support for scientific assessments underscore the necessity of a broad-based, resilient, and scalable assessment framework with sustained engagement of [...]
Timelines of vegetation recovery following fire in a shrub-dominated Mediterranean-type ecosystem
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Fire is a natural disturbance in many Mediterranean-type ecosystems, but wildfires are increasing in frequency and severity in many places worldwide, including California. Vegetation recovery following wildfire is critical for landscape stability and foundational to resilience of many ecosystem processes in the years and decades that follow fire. While remote sensing tools are increasingly [...]
Aligning evidence and action: The Research-to-Decision (RED) Framework to address modern environmental and ecological challenges
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Databases and Information Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Models and Methods, Multivariate Analysis, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
Ecological and biodiversity crises are intensifying amid rapid advances in sensing, computation, and artificial intelligence (AI). AI offers unprecedented capabilities to understand complex ecological systems, provided outputs are interpretable, applied responsibly, and evaluated by domain experts. When addressing key challenges, science-policy frictions arise through different requirements [...]
Disentangling the drivers of parasite occurrence in a native and a non-native small mammal across a land-use gradient
Published: 2026-09-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Parasitology
Land-use change can reorganize host--parasite systems by altering environmental conditions, host communities, and transmission pathways. Yet parasite occurrence remains difficult to predict as it is shaped simultaneously by the environment, host identity, individual host attributes, the within-host microbiome, and parasite biology. We integrated these components within a single framework for two [...]
Why abundance-based indices of niche breadth are biased, and what can be done to improve them
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Niche breadth is a central concept in ecology, and species with narrow niche breadth are believed to be more sensitive to anthropogenic factors than species with broad niche breadth. A myriad of methods to assess niche breadth have been suggested, many of them reliant on estimates of relative abundance (e.g., across habitats). We show, using both simulations and empirical data, that due to [...]
Global Evidence for Biotic Differentiation Amid Contrasting Freshwater β-Diversity Responses to Human Impacts
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Human pressures are reshaping freshwater biodiversity worldwide, yet the generality of biotic homogenization and the contexts in which differentiation instead emerges remain unresolved. These contrasting responses reflect decreases or increases in spatial β-diversity, respectively, as local assemblages within a region become more similar or more distinct in community composition. We conducted a [...]
The marine annelid trait manifesto: A call to rethink functional traits for ecological and conservation research
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
The Raunkiæran shortfall, defined as the scarcity of knowledge regarding species' attributes, represents one of the major obstacles to developing sound biodiversity conservation strategies and understanding ecological processes. In this context, despite the importance of marine annelids as dominant components of benthic ecosystems and key agents of marine ecosystem functioning, no comprehensive [...]
INSTAR: reporting items for invertebrate welfare in research
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Concern for the welfare of research animals has expanded rapidly across taxa, with increasing focus on invertebrates. Recent evidence for affective experience in cephalopod, decapod and insect taxa, alongside shifts in public attitudes and regulation, has raised the stakes of how invertebrates are used and reported, yet no reporting standard adequately addresses them. Here we present INSTAR [...]
Which modelling choices are supported when marine survey data are limited? An evidence map of 95 studies and a benchmark on structured subsamples of a trawl survey
Published: 2026-09-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Marine management decisions increasingly rest on species distribution models fitted to sparse, clustered survey records, while the guidance for fitting them comes from data-rich settings. We asked which modelling choices have been tested under the conditions marine practitioners face, and whether the ordering that guidance assumes, spatial structure before algorithm choice, holds at the [...]
Regulation 1143/2014 has yet to curb the European Union’s invasive species crisis
Published: 2026-09-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The European Union’s flagship legislation on invasive species, Regulation 1143/2014, was intended to deliver coordinated biosecurity across Member States. However, it continues to fall short of its ambitious goals as enforcement remains inconsistent, ecological priorities are often overridden by economic interests, taxonomic, geographic and ecosystem biases, and practical on-the-ground management [...]
Foraging group size affects repeatable individual variation and strategic social plasticity
Published: 2026-09-22
Subjects: Animal Studies, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Although game theory successfully predicts how negative frequency dependence can maintain behavioural variation through stable equilibria, it does not predict whether this variation reflects repeatable differences among individuals or variation within individuals. Because social group size influences how individuals respond to social information, it may shape how individual variation is [...]
Growing disequilibria in species distributions and assemblage diversity until the end of the 21st‑century
Published: 2026-09-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Biodiversity forecasts almost universally assume that species are in equilibrium with contemporary environmental conditions. The consequences of this assumption are rarely tested, yet it may systematically bias inference and prediction whenever past natural or anthropogenic disturbances leave legacy effects keeping biodiversity in disequilibrium. Here we test how accounting for such legacy [...]