Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
What, if anything, can studies of adaptation to altitude reveal about responses to climate change?
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding the impacts of global climate change on biodiversity is critical to its conservation. Existing frameworks within evolutionary biology can help us predict whether, and under what conditions, adaptation may be a sufficient means for population persistance in a changing environment. Here, we consider the relevance of mountain ranges as natural systems for studying this process. [...]
Diurnal temperature fluctuations outweigh population origin in shaping thermal performance and range predictions in European Aedes albopictus
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Predicting invasive ectotherm responses to climate change requires understanding how population-level variation and diurnal temperature fluctuations shape thermal performance, and whether constant-temperature measurements accurately capture performance under fluctuating conditions. Yet many models, including those used to predict mosquito distribution and disease transmission, still rely on [...]
Genomic repetition in climate adaptation across different crop species
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Commercial crop varieties (cultivars) have a narrow genetic diversity that makes them vulnerable to climate change. Yet most crops have related semi-domesticated varieties (landraces) and wild relatives that thrive under climates that would be considered extreme for cultivars. The genomes of such varieties are reservoirs of unknown adaptive traits, some of which could be used to extend the [...]
Nonlinear survey-effort adjustment removes the reported bird-diversity effect
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A recent study published in Science reported that greater photovoltaic policy stringency (PSI) was associated with lower Shannon diversity, lower Simpson diversity, lower species richness, and slightly higher species evenness in China. We exactly reproduced their published model and then evaluated seven alternative survey-effort specifications across Richness, Shannon diversity, Simpson [...]
Amplexus Takeover in the Asian Common Toad, Duttaphrynus melanostictus, in Dumka, Jharkhand, India
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
I report an instance of amplexus takeover in the Asian Common Toad, Duttaphrynus melanostictus, observed at Simardhuma village, Dumka District, Jharkhand, India, on 21 July 2025. Over an 18-minute sequence, a second male repeatedly interfered with an amplectant pair until the amplectant male released the female, after which the second male assumed amplexus. Although male replacement is known [...]
Toward a General Theory of Heteromorphic Reproduction
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Organisms often divide reproductive investment among outputs that differ in morphology, timing, or reproductive mechanism. In this paper I extend the minimum-risk treatment of seed heteromorphism to the more general question of organisms with ‘portfolios’ of biologically distinct reproductive outputs. The resulting framework specifies a common investment and fitness currency, calculates returns [...]
Wildlife Responses to a Resident a Family: A Three-Year Camera Census on Restored Prairie–Savanna (2024–2026)
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A steward-conducted trail-camera census on a restored prairie–savanna complex in Washburn County, Wisconsin, labeled every frame from ten cameras at nine fixed stations for 2024, 2025 and January–June 2026 (11,820 frames; 11,135 estimated wildlife individuals; 1,027 frames of the resident family). White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) made up 67–83% of wildlife individuals in each year. [...]
Wolf–Deer and Guild Camera-trap Detections Across Wisconsin’s Statewide Wolf Range (2018–2025), Resolved by Deer Class: Buck Selection in the Hard-Antler Season, Bears and Fawns, and Class-Specific Reference Values for Displacement
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A statewide analysis of wolf-enriched Snapshot Wisconsin camera data (Vraniak 2026d) reported four things: wolves following deer, a temporary rise in that following after the February 2021 wolf harvest, displacement of deer by wolves, and avoidance of people across five co-occurring species. All of it treated deer as a single class. This companion resolves the deer into antlered bucks, antlerless [...]
Modeling Decomposition: Beyond a Well-Mixed World
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Carbon cycle models overlook resource patchiness and networked foraging characterizing terrestrial carbon dynamics. They treat inputs as well mixed and decomposers as acting at local scales, making substrate stoichiometry, rather than spatial access, the primary constraint on decomposition. Using deadwood decomposition by cord-forming fungi and termites as examples, we illustrate how resource [...]
Common, consequential, and actively maintained: a neo-balance view of genetic variation
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A fundamental and still unfinished task of evolutionary biology is to understand the nature of genetic variation and the evolutionary forces that shape it. The traditional approach to this problem is through retrospective inference from patterns in contemporary, static DNA sequence data. The prevailing view that emerged from these studies and from theoretical research is that segregating genetic [...]
Evenness under incomplete sampling: coupled error channels, hidden compensation, and the richness-estimation bottleneck
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Normalized evenness combines an abundance-diversity functional with richness, so incomplete sampling acts through two coupled errors. For \(E_{\alpha,\beta}=L_\beta(D_\alpha)/L_\beta(S)\), the log-error decomposes exactly as \(T_\beta=U_\beta+V_\beta\). With observed richness, \(V_\beta\) is nonnegative whenever species are missed, but total error can have either sign. 2. We generated 950,100 [...]
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 [...]