Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Audio embeddings identify novel sounds and track soundscape change within a tropical restoration landscape
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is increasingly being used over conventional biodiversity surveys because it is more cost-effective and implementable at a landscape level. However, the cheaper sensors that removed the barriers to PAM have now shifted the challenge from data collection to interpretation. Acoustic indices address this by condensing each recording into single summary statistics, [...]
Solar parks as an opportunity to jointly advance climate-change mitigation and biodiversity conservation
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations
Anthropogenic climate change is among the most pressing challenges for humanity making carbon-neutral energy production a top priority. Across the globe, solar energy is the single fastest growing energy source with solar parks covering more and more land surface area across many continents. The rise in solar energy production affects terrestrial biodiversity in the areas now occupied by solar [...]
Post-dispersal seed predation reflects tree species occurrence beyond local neighborhoods in a forest biodiversity experiment
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences
Post-dispersal seed predation is a key mechanism underlying Janzen-Connell (JC) effects with seed predation expected to decline with increasing distance from conspecific trees. However, the spatial scale at which seed predators respond to the occurrence of their resource tree species remains poorly understood. In particular, mobile consumers may respond to resource distributions beyond the local [...]
Disentangling trait and phylogenetic signals in species co-occurrence: a Bayesian dyadic regression approach
Published: 2026-09-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim: Understanding the factors shaping species co-occurrence is a central objective in ecology. Progress is hindered by correlations among species traits and phylogenetic relationships, which confound each other’s signals. Regression-based approaches hold promise to ameliorate this issue, but the current toolkit lacks methods that combine suitable likelihoods for co-occurrence data with latent [...]
Climate-associated genomic differentiation in Lemmon’s willow, an important restoration species
Published: 2026-09-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Restoration practitioners are considering assisted gene flow to promote persistence of restored vegetation under future climatic conditions. However, for many important restoration species, the extent of climate-associated genomic differentiation remains unclear. Here, we examined climate-associated genomic differentiation in Lemmon’s willow (Salix lemmonii), a key species in Sierra Nevada meadow [...]
Temperature drives transcriptomic shifts in amphibian skin bacterial communities with consequences for fungal pathogen control
Published: 2026-09-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Genomics, Life Sciences
The chytrid fungi Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal) are two of the largest threats to amphibian populations worldwide. While the amphibian skin microbiome can inhibit these fungal pathogens, microbial composition varies substantially across host and environmental contexts. In addition, habitat-wide mitigation methods that capitalize on the thermal [...]
Migration timing depends on balancing the risks of exposure and escape from infection
Published: 2026-09-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
As anthropogenic changes alter animal migration routes, understanding the consequences of these changes is critical for conservation. One consequence of altered migratory routes is exposure to infection by new parasites (i.e., migratory exposure). Theoretical models aiming to understand migration-infection dynamics typically have focused on infection-related benefits (i.e., migratory escape) to [...]
Traditional Ecological Relationship Family sharing an abundant home within nature requires recurring mutual adaptation rather than the extraction of knowledge by passing visitors
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Relationship, not knowledge, is the unit for understanding people within nature; family is the fundamental form holding what is of value about life in a place — the residue and repository of a relationship kept across generations from the inside. Ecological science accumulates a wealth of knowledge from the outside; a family in relationship with nature is concerned with surviving, sustaining [...]
Relational acoustic geometry of over 20,000 common nightingale strophes: a framework for continuous vocal analysis
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ornithology
Large collections of complex animal vocalizations are often organized through predefined song categories, which provide powerful descriptive units but do not directly characterize continuous and representation-dependent relationships within the acoustic material. This study presents a field-grounded framework for examining such relationships without assigning vocalizations to categories in [...]
Designing optimal biodiversity observation networks
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Meeting the goals of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) requires a substantial increase in biodiversity monitoring effort, motivating the development of a Global Biodiversity Observing System (GBiOS). However, GBiOS cannot be built without a practical framework for designing effective biodiversity monitoring networks that balances budgetary constraints with competing policy objectives, which [...]
Global patterns of fish–macrocrustacean interactions in freshwater environments: a systematic review
Published: 2026-09-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Understanding species interactions is central to ecology, yet they remain one of the least documented dimensions of biodiversity (the Eltonian shortfall). Most studies have focused on terrestrial vertebrates, while aquatic vertebrates and invertebrates are still poorly understood. Here, we assessed broad patterns in the published literature on interactions between fishes and macrocrustaceans [...]
Environmental water management and H5 bird flu in waterbirds: Context and scenarios for decision-making
Published: 2026-09-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The impact of animal viruses has dramatically increased over the last decade globally, exemplified by the disruption caused by the recent panzootic of high pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b (H5 bird flu), which has caused the deaths of millions of wild birds and mammals, as well as domestic animals such as poultry. Wild waterbirds play a role in the spread of H5 bird flu [...]
A Sharma–Mittal Geometry of Evenness: Representation, Cardinal Resolution, and Relative Merits
Published: 2026-09-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The proliferation of evenness indices creates an interpretive problem whenever several admissible measures assign different numerical values to the same assemblage. We study that problem by normalizing Sharma–Mittal entropy to its maximum at complete uniformity. Written in terms of the Hill number of order α, the resulting surface is [...]
Do we need all of this research synthesis in ecology and conservation? A highly subjective criticism of reviews and meta-analyses
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Research synthesis, which includes systematic reviews and meta-analyses, provides applied ecologists and conservationists with big pictures of ecological processes and the effectiveness of conservation interventions. It can therefore hugely benefit applied ecology and conservation science. However, while in some areas of ecology and the conservation sciences study design, measurements and [...]
Behavioural strategy and predator control: a coupled evolutionary predator-prey model for kiwi conservation in New Zealand
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Behavior and Ethology, Dynamic Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Population Biology
Conservation management of endangered species can be enhanced by quantitative frameworks that simultaneously model behavioural adaptations alongside population dynamics. This paper presents a Coupled Evolutionary Predator-Prey Model (CEPPM) that integrates replicator dynamics from Evolutionary Game Theory with an extended Lotka-Volterra predator-prey framework, applied to kiwi (Apteryx spp.) [...]