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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Evolutionary rate incongruences in squamates reveal contrasting patterns of evolutionary novelties and innovation

Tiago R. Simões, Arthur S. Brum, Stephanie E. Pierce

Published: 2025-05-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

Understanding the rate of phenotypic evolution can reveal fundamental aspects of organismal evolutionary trajectories. Hence, several studies have attempted to detect the tempo of evolution for multiple organisms, although based on radically different datatypes (e.g., discrete and morphometric) and methods (phylodynamic vs comparative methods). Here, we ask whether these competing approaches [...]

Practical genetic diversity protection: an accessible framework for IUCN subpopulation and Evolutionarily Significant Unit identification

Julia Caroline Geue, Laura Bertola, Bloomer Paulette, et al.

Published: 2025-05-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) sets global conservation standards, including the Red List of Threatened Species and the Green Status of Species. Recent analyses showed that genetic diversity has not been effectively considered by IUCN species assessments, despite being fundamental to species’ fitness and adaptive potential. Incorporation of genetic diversity into IUCN [...]

Genetic load in Evolutionarily Significant Units (ESUs): conservation and management implications

Cock van Oosterhout, J. Andrew DeWoody, José A. Godoy, et al.

Published: 2025-05-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences

The Conservation Genetics Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) proposes introducing Evolutionarily Significant Units (ESUs) as an additional new assessment unit in the IUCN Red List and Green Status. This proposal is made because ESUs possess unique evolutionary trajectories present within species and harbour genetic diversity that requires safeguarding. [...]

Using large language models to address the bottleneck of georeferencing natural history collections

Yuyang Xie, Daniel S Park, Miranda A Sinnott-Armstrong, et al.

Published: 2025-05-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Natural history collections are fundamental for biodiversity research. The broad use of them relies on the digitization effort, especially georeferencing that translates textual locality descriptions into geographic coordinates. However, traditional georeferencing approaches are labor-intensive and costly, thus georeferencing is a major bottleneck in the digitization process that prevents the [...]

The bright, the bold and the toxic: do coloration, personality, and toxicity represent an integrated phenotype in fire salamanders?

Max Mühlenhaupt, Henry J. Bohny, Maria Moiron, et al.

Published: 2025-05-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Defensive coloration such as bright colors used to advertise secondary defenses (i.e., aposematic coloration) is very common but also shows high intraspecific variation. Similarly, consistent among-individual differences in behavior (i.e., animal personality) are pervasive in the animal kingdom. Therefore, aposematism and personality could be linked to produce an optimal defensive phenotype, [...]

Nature requires investment: applying Priority Threat Management to support biodiversity and climate targets

Abbey E Camaclang, Aranya Iyer, Chris Liang, et al.

Published: 2025-04-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy

1. Stemming biodiversity loss requires greater investment in conservation and more efficient use of available resources. Prioritizing conservation actions that yield the most biodiversity benefit for the least cost can help maximize return on investment. Actions that have co-benefits for other objectives, such as climate change mitigation, can also help mobilize additional funds for [...]

Creating woodland through natural processes: Current understanding and knowledge gaps in Great Britain

Susannah Fleiss, Vanessa Burton, Bianca Ambrose-Oji, et al.

Published: 2025-04-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

1. Creating new woodlands through natural processes, as opposed to traditional tree planting, is expected to result in more structurally diverse, locally-adapted woodlands that enhance the resilience of existing treescapes. However, the outcomes of natural colonisation can be variable, and there is still considerable uncertainty around the ecological processes involved. 2. To address knowledge [...]

Seasonal upwelling and depth-driven gradients foster functional overdispersion in Southwestern Atlantic annelid assemblages

Samuel Delgado Mendes, Paulo Cesar de Paiva, Rodolfo Leandro Nascimento

Published: 2025-04-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology

Marine communities on continental shelves form through a combination of environmental filtering, biotic interaction, and dispersal-based processes. These shelves present depth-related environmental gradients from nearshore and seasonal upwelling systems, which periodically supply cold, dispersalenhancing, nutrient-rich waters, providing an ideal setting to explore spatiotemporal [...]

Facing the heat: behavioral and molecular underpinnings of climate hardiness in bumblebees

Nastacia Leigh Goodwin, Z Yan Wang

Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Behavioral Neurobiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Climate change heralds an era of increased heat waves, with an estimated 20-30 additional high heat days per year. While climate change is upon us, we still have little understanding of the organismal impacts of high heat and how to combat them. Insects, due to their short generation times and their sensitive ecological requirements, offer a powerful model for studying rapid physiological and [...]

Designing Multi-Modal Ecosystem Monitoring Technologies: A Network of Networks Approach

Christopher Benjamin Anderson

Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Software Engineering

The central promise of ecosystem monitoring technologies — like bioacoustic, camera trap, citizen science, eDNA, and satellite data — is to reveal changes in the structure and composition of the Earth’s ecological systems to facilitate timely and effective conservation action. Following the evolution and maturation of these technology systems, the fusion of multimodal observation systems — where [...]

Improving landscape fire frequency estimates by integrating public land fire data and satellite imagery

Felicity Eloise Charles, April E Reside, Patrick T Moss, et al.

Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Background Contemporary fire regimes are changing rapidly, and effective fire management requires knowledge of fire history, often derived from satellite imagery. Satellites, however, are not well suited to detecting low intensity fires, meaning fire history data are often inaccurate. Aims We aimed to improve satellite fire frequency estimates by incorporating data from fire history on public [...]

Leveraging large language models for ecological interpretation using an eBird chatbot case study

Elise Gallois, Arianna Salili-James, Sanson T. S. Poon, et al.

Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

1. The anthropocene presents significant challenges for global biodiversity, public health, and long-term ecosystem stability. The wealth of publicly available near-real-time ecology and climate data can be used to monitor these challenges and allow practitioners to develop mitigation strategies. 2. There is untapped potential to apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to quantitative ecological and [...]

Short reproductive periods dominate mast seeding across diverse tree species

Katarzyna Kondrat, Jakub Szymkowiak, Andrew Hacket-Pain, et al.

Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Biology

Mast seeding, synchronous and highly variable reproduction among perennial plants, profoundly impacts ecosystem dynamics and species interactions. However, the extent of periodicity in mast seeding, defined as cyclical but not strictly regular intervals between reproduction, remains poorly understood, including how it varies across and within species. Here, we used autoregressive analyses on seed [...]

A method of predicting ecological community structure

John Alroy

Published: 2025-04-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

1. Species inventories are the most basic form of ecological data. They provide information both about species richness and about community assembly rules. Fitting species abundance distribution models yields such information. Previous distributions either fit the data badly, assume that all species are equivalent, or ignore sampling processes. A distribution called the compound [...]

BOLDistilled: Comprehensive but compact DNA barcode reference libraries

Sean William John Prosser, Robin M Floyd, Ken A Thompson, et al.

Published: 2025-04-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Advances in DNA sequencing technology have stimulated the rapid uptake of protocols—such as eDNA analysis and metabarcoding—that infer the species composition of environmental samples from DNA sequences. DNA barcode reference libraries play a critical role in the interpretation of sequences gathered through such protocols, but many lack adequate taxonomic curation, include redundant records, do [...]

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