Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The interplay between ecological networks drives host-plasmid community dynamics
Published: 2025-06-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Plasmids drive bacterial evolution by transferring adaptive traits, such as metabolism and antimicrobial resistance, between members of microbial communities. There are trends and barriers to plasmid transmission, which likely emerge from both host-plasmid interactions (e.g. plasmid host ranges), and plasmid-plasmid interactions (e.g. plasmid incompatibility). However, while both interaction [...]
Systematic mapping and bibliometric analysis of meta-analyses on animal cognition
Published: 2025-06-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Psychiatry and Psychology
Meta-analyses play an important role in empirically synthesising research and guiding future directions. The field of animal cognition is rapidly expanding, with both empirical and review papers increasing at a faster rate than those in the life sciences overall. However, the use of meta-analyses, their methodological rigour, and the geographic distribution of research activity remain unclear. We [...]
Relative High Fitness and Genome-wide Diversity May Facilitate Plastic and Active Foragers' Diversification
Published: 2025-06-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Explaining the variation in diversification rates across the Tree of Life is an important challenge for evolutionary biologists. Growing evidence suggests that key innovations or historical contingency give rise to high diversification rates, but the genetic mechanisms through which this process may occur remain poorly investigated. Based on fitness landscapes, a high diversification is [...]
Seabird range contraction and dispersal under climate change
Published: 2025-06-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Many marine ectotherms have historically adapted to local climate change by evolving smaller body sizes, reducing their energy demands in warmer waters but limiting their dispersal and speciation rate. Whether endothermic marine species respond similarly remains unclear, as temperature minimally affects their size diversity, and the drivers of their dispersal and speciation are poorly understood. [...]
Towards causal predictions of site-level treatment effects for applied ecology
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
With limited land and resources available to implement conservation actions, efforts must be effectively targeted to individual places. This demands predictions of how individual sites respond to alternative interventions. Meta-learner algorithms for predicting individual level treatment effects (ITEs) have been pioneered in marketing and medicine, but they have not been tested in ecology. We [...]
Spatial and environmental influences on the assembly of silk microbiomes in a social spider
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences
In nesting animals, the built environment can play an important role in host-associated microbiome assembly. However, the sources and processes structuring the resulting microbiome remain underexplored. In the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola, philopatric sisters collectively build and maintain a silken nest, capture prey, and exhibit alloparental care. We used S. dumicola as a test system to [...]
Suspended particulates decline along a dense, small-stream mussel bed
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Water filtration by freshwater mussels is a valued ecosystem service; however, it has not been well studied in natural settings. To examine the potential influence of mussel filtration on suspended particulates, we measured the concentration of Escherichia coli, chlorophyll-a, and total suspended solids along a stream reach with a dense mussel assemblage (Mussel Site) and a stream reach with no [...]
A framework for modelling thermal load sensitivity across life
Published: 2025-06-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences
Forecasts of vulnerability to climate warming require an integrative understanding of how species are exposed to, are damaged by, and recover from thermal stress in natural environments. The sensitivity of species to temperature depends on the frequency, duration, and magnitude of thermal stress. Thus, there is a generally recognised need to move beyond physiological metrics based solely on [...]
Barriers and opportunities to preventing residential bird-window collisions
Published: 2025-05-31
Subjects: Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Sociology
Collisions with windows are a leading source of avian mortality in North America. Window treatment options are commercially available; however, these solutions are rarely used. To investigate knowledge and perceptions of bird-window collisions, willingness to treat windows, and barriers and solutions to treating windows we conducted a survey of residents in Ottawa, Canada. Of 422 survey [...]
A systematic map of forest disturbance impacts on soil and litter fauna: knowledge gaps and a roadmap for future research
Published: 2025-05-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Natural disturbances such as fires, droughts, windthrow, and pest outbreaks are increasing in frequency and severity, placing new pressures on forest ecosystems. Impacts on aboveground biodiversity are well understood, but effects on belowground communities - particularly soil and litter invertebrate fauna - remain understudied. Given the vast diversity of soil organisms, forest types, and [...]
Herbarium specimens reveal regional patterns of tallgrass prairie invasion and changing species abundance across 130 years
Published: 2025-05-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
The spread of non-native species is an acute threat to global biodiversity. However, a lack of long-term, spatially widespread occurrence data has prevented investigation of how multi-species invasions affect native assemblages. We harnessed more than 65,000 digitized herbarium specimens across 522 species to study how relative abundances of native and non-native species have changed since the [...]
Cellular Innovations and Diversity in the Lepidopteran Compound Eye
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics
Lepidoptera, having co-diversified with flowering plants and adapted to various diel niches, present a remarkable system for studying compound eye cell type diversity. Here we synthesize the latest research regarding lepidopteran eye evolution across different timescales, from species-level variation to family-level changes, and mechanistic levels, from broad anatomical variation to molecular [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. Sandy Beaches & Dunes of the West African Transition
Published: 2025-05-22
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Abstract The ‘Sandy Beaches and Dunes of the West African Transition’ form a regional ecosystem subgroup along the West African coast. It had a mapped extent of 584 km² in 2022, with a width ranging from 0.012 km to 4.796 km, and stretching over approximately 1321 km. This ecosystem subgroup extends along the shores of Mauritania, The Gambia and Senegal. This ecosystem frequently experiences [...]
Filling Monitoring Gaps for Data-deficient Species Using Annual Occupancy Predictions from Co-occurrence Models
Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Fragmented surveys and limited monitoring exclude most invertebrate species from conservation policy. We present a framework that generates annual occupancy predictions using species distribution models (SDMs) to reconstruct missing trends—not to extrapolate trends, but to fill them in (the fill-in approach). Instead of filtering poor-data regions and years or relying on static environmental [...]
Disordered systems in community ecology: a tutorial
Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A basic fact of community ecology is that most ecosystems are comprised of many species and processes. Mathematical models trying to capture these ingredients and explain empirical phenomena usually face the problem of having vast numbers of unknown parameters and uncertain assumptions. It is not obvious when such mathematical models can truly be quantitatively predictive, or even conceptually [...]