Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
More trees, more moths: how urban treescapes can help reverse moth declines
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Moths are undergoing widespread declines in abundance, biomass and diversity, with consequences for pollination, herbivory and trophic interactions. Yet moth conservation remains poorly integrated into biodiversity policy and practice, particularly in urban environments. Here, we argue that trees offer an underused, but very timely, opportunity to support urban moth communities. Trees provide [...]
Deep Learning for Combating Wildlife and Environmental Crime: A Survey
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Wildlife and Environmental Crime (WEC) describes illegal activities that threaten biodiversity and harm the environment. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has shown strong potential in combating WEC by learning complex patterns in data through the extraction of high-dimensional features. DL also offers powerful capabilities for prediction, classification, and object tracking, and has become an [...]
Microhabitat structure predicts eye presence in bryophyte-dwelling tardigrade communities
Published: 2026-07-20
Subjects: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Microscopic invertebrates often exhibit variation in eye presence within closely related taxa, yet the ecological correlates of this variation remain poorly understood. In tardigrades, eyes may occur or be absent even among species inhabiting similar environments. Because structures that enable seeing are frequently linked to environmental conditions, we investigated which factors influence eye [...]
Lactate Dehydrogenase as a Candidate Genomic Marker of Climate Change in Mammals?
Published: 2026-07-13
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Evolution, Genetics, Genomics, Molecular Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Climate change imposes metabolic and thermal stress on mammals, yet genomic markers that track lineage specific adaptation remain limited. Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), a central enzyme in lactate metabolism and anaerobic stress response, has not previously been evaluated for its evolutionary association with climate change induced selection. Here, comparative genomics across 14 mammalian species [...]
Analysis of in-situ biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management in Twenty-three selected Sacred Groves of Manipur within Indo-Burma Biodiversity Hotspot : Bio-legal aspects
Published: 2026-07-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Environmental Law, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
In Manipur, Sacred Groves (SGs), known as “Umang Lai," which literally means ‘forest deities’, are worshipped in forest or thick vegetation areas. A total of 365 SGs have been officially reported in Manipur, a biodiversity hotspot of India. The concept of SG is founded on the traditional religious belief systems which aid in the sustainable and restrictive utilization of resources within it. [...]
From a review to the field: Alternative coping styles under urbanisation
Published: 2026-07-06
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Endocrinology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physiology, Population Biology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Zoology
Under human-induced rapid environmental changes, behavioural and physiological responses of organisms are key to maintain homeostasis and minimise fitness loss. Both responses can be integrated, into among-individual correlations forming stress-coping styles or syndromes (SCS). Such SCS emerge from genetic correlations or adaptive trade-offs. In the context of environmental challenges, more [...]
What’s in a name? Bioinformatics and the challenge of using eDNA metabarcoding to report non-indigenous species detections
Published: 2026-07-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is increasingly employed for surveillance of non-indigenous species (NIS), offering the promise of simultaneous multi-taxon de-tection, scalability, and the capacity for early detection before populations become es-tablished. The sensitivity of metabarcoding that makes it attractive for NIS surveil-lance also creates a meaningful risk of erroneous detections [...]
Bridging nutritional geometry and network ecology to quantify the robustness of nutritional networks
Published: 2026-07-01
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Nutrition, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Understanding the robustness and resilience of ecological networks is key to managing ecosystems and mitigating biodiversity loss. Simple models of network robustness simulate species losses across ecological networks but lack physiological realism, asserting that species persist if they interact with another organism. This neglects the nutritional consequences of resource loss and nutrition as a [...]
A self tuning sliding window method for detecting phenotype linked regional poly-methylation architecture in sparse wildlife methylomes
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Despite featuring extreme physiological adaptations integration of wildlife species into the modern ‘omics’ frameworks are limited due to the sparsity in the data. To address the sparsity limitation a self-tuning sliding-window framework was developed for the identification of the regional poly-CpG methylation architecture associated with phenotypic traits. Under the framework the iteratively [...]
Joint species distributions reveal crop type and field-specific assembly rules and idiosyncrasies in carabid beetle occurrences and abundances
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Designing effective biodiversity conservation and pest regulation strategies in agroecosystems requires understanding how environmental gradients and assembly rules jointly structure ecological communities. 2. We fitted a hurdle joint species distribution model (jSDM) to presence–absence and conditional abundance data of 20 carabid species sampled across 57 arable fields in three French [...]
Natural history models of bird–building collisions
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Building collisions kill an estimated 1.28–5.19 billion birds annually in North America, making them the second leading cause of human-related avian mortality. Yet the behavioral and ecological drivers of collisions remain difficult to disentangle, as most knowledge derives from carcass surveys rather than direct observations. Here, we propose a conceptual framework that synthesizes four natural [...]
History, challenges, and opportunities in the study of entomopathogenic fungi in tropical regions: Borneo as a model ecosystem
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Fungal pathogens tend to have a poor reputation as a disease among the general public and policy-makers. However, entomopathogenic fungi, adapted to infect and kill arthropod hosts, play a wide range of roles in ecosystems, provide key ecosystem services, and offer interesting models to understand pathogen interaction networks. Tropical regions provide especially favorable conditions for [...]
Towards integrating interaction networks into global parasite conservation: insights from bats, bat flies and their fungal associates
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Parasites are a key conservation blind spot. Even though parasitism is a widespread ecological lifestyle, most parasite diversity remains unknown, as do the interactions in which they are involved. Some parasite species are involved in multitrophic interactions, meaning they span multiple trophic levels. These complex interactions are generally understudied, and conservation frameworks fail to [...]
Are We Mapping Ecosystems or Models? Framework Choices Dominate Food Web Topology and Extinction Inferences
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim Ecological networks are widely used to assess community structure, stability, and responses to disturbance. Such networks often require model-based reconstructions (e.g., based on traits or theoretical constraints); however, the extent to which these frameworks influence ecological inference remains unexplored. Here, we assess whether macroecological inference derived from ecological [...]
An integrated framework for unifying our understanding of nonconsumptive predation risk effects
Published: 2026-06-12
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Predation risk can induce risk-induced trait responses (RITRs) – changes in prey defensive traits including behavior, morphology, life history, and physiology – thought to have profound effects on prey fitness and population dynamics (termed ‘nonconsumptive effects’). Yet, predicting the magnitude of RITRs and their fitness consequences remains difficult because outcomes depend heavily on [...]