Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biology
Revealing the unknown world of the endangered Lear's macaw using GPS-tracking data: identification of critical habitats for conservation
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Understanding space use and home range is essential for the conservation planning of threatened species as it helps to assess the suitability, extent, and placement of conservation areas that are imperative for species survival and protection. The Endangered Lear’s macaw (Anodorhynchus leari), a highly mobile frugivore, feeding specialist and endemic to Brazil’s Caatinga dry forest, faces ongoing [...]
Lateralisation shapes spatial learning in lizards
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Evolution, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Spatial memory is fundamental cognitive process that allows animals to navigate and interact with their environment effectively. While extensively studied in mammals and birds, the mechanisms underlying spatial cognition in reptiles remain less understood. In this study, we investigated spatial learning and the potential influence of behavioural lateralisation in the common wall lizard (Podarcis [...]
The myth of the metabolic baseline: how sleep-wake cycles undermine a foundational assumption in organismal biology
Published: 2025-08-29
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology
Basal and standard metabolic rates (BMR and SMR) are cornerstones of physiological ecology and are assumed to be relatively fixed intrinsic properties of organisms that represent the minimum energy required to sustain life. However, this assumption is conceptually flawed. Many core maintenance processes underlying SMR are temporally partitioned across sleep and wakefulness and are not [...]
Frequent shifts in pollination strategy are decoupled from diversification in the terrestrial orchids
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Pollinator attraction strategies are central to orchid reproductive biology and have long been hypothesised to accelerate speciation rates, particularly through specialised coevolutionary interactions. However, most macroevolutionary evidence comes from studies of individual genera or tribes, leaving broad-scale patterns unresolved. Here, we reconstruct the evolution of pollination strategy in [...]
Embryos are largely understudied in conservation physiology
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology
Understanding how animals respond to environmental stressors across their life cycle is essential for predicting species’ vulnerability to climate change. Here, we systematically reviewed the literature to quantify the variation in research effort on different life stages in the field of conservation physiology. Specifically, we reviewed experimental studies measuring physiological and [...]
Catalogue of Papilionoidea from Noguera de Albarracín (Teruel, Spain), including new distributional data for the Sierra de Albarracín (Insecta: Lepidoptera)
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Zoology
We present a catalogue of butterflies from Noguera de Albarracín (Teruel, Spain), based on field surveys conducted in 2024 and 2025 within the framework of the Iberozoa Entomology Course. A total of 52 species were recorded, representing 20.15% of the Iberian butterfly fauna. The material belongs to 5 families, 13 subfamilies, 33 genera and 52 species. Lycaenidae was the richest family with 16 [...]
Trapper Citizen Science: an open-source camera trap platform for citizen science in wildlife research and management
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Computational Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Effective wildlife monitoring is essential for biodiversity conservation and sustainable management, particularly in the face of rapid environmental changes and human-wildlife interactions. Advances in camera trap technology and citizen science, here used to denote non-professional involvement in scientific research, irrespective of citizenship status, have revolutionized ecological data [...]
Exploring the Integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Artificial Intelligence to Mitigate Human-Wildlife Conflict in Kerala, India
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Increasing human-wildlife conflict (HWC) in forest-fringe landscapes necessitates innovative and culturally acceptable mitigation strategies. This note proposes integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mitigate HWC in Kerala. The proposition aims to translate African rural traditional knowledge of using alarm calls of Guinea fowls (Numida meleagris) [...]
Threatened Alpine and Subalpine Ecosystems of Australia: An IUCN Red List of Ecosystems Assessment Version 0.5
Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Genetic evidence for the rediscovery in the wild of the critically endangered Sahara killifish Apricaphanius saourensis (Cyprinodontiformes: Aphaniidae)
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Zoology
Apricaphanius saourensis was described in 2006 from the Saoura River in western Algeria, and is currently listed as possibly extinct in the wild. We recently discovered an aphaniid population in a very isolated secondary wadi of the Guir River about 115 Km northwest of A. saourensis’ type locality, which we hypothesized could belong to A. saourensis based on images taken from living individuals. [...]
DrawerDissect: Whole-drawer insect imaging, segmentation, and transcription using AI
Published: 2025-07-15
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
1. Natural history museums often curate large collections of pinned insects. These collections represent invaluable records of biodiversity information, ecological patterns and phenotypic variation. A common goal of museums is to create digital versions of these records for curation and research purposes. However, traditional methods of specimen imaging and metadata transcription are [...]
Topological equivalence of stomata distribution patterns across vascular plants
Published: 2025-07-08
Subjects: Biology, Botany, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Stomata are ancient anatomical structures on leaves that regulate the exchange of water vapor, oxygen, and carbon dioxide between plants and the atmosphere. Acting as valve-like gateways between internal tissues and the external environment, stomata may function as locally interacting networks. Theoretical and experimental evidence suggests that local interactions among neighboring stomata [...]
Body condition as a shared response to environment in a commercially important demersal fish assemblage
Published: 2025-06-28
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Measures of an organism's weight at a given length are often considered reliable indicators of energy reserves or `condition', which can be related to fecundity and risk of mortality. Understanding the impact of environmental change on fish condition may therefore be critical for sustainable management of human activities in marine ecosystems. We investigated how changes in Canadian Pacific [...]
Elevating the importance of Risk of Bias assessment for ecology and evolution
Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are key evidence synthesis methods informing research and policy. An assessment of the Risk of Bias (RoB) in included studies is normally considered an essential component of these. However, RoB assessment is rare in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), and tools from other fields are seldom adopted. To identify reasons for this limited uptake, we surveyed [...]
Comparing statistical methods for detecting climatic drivers of mast seeding
Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Understanding the drivers of mast seeding is critical for predicting reproductive dynamics in perennial plants. Here, we evaluate the performance of four statistical methods for identifying weather-associated drivers of annual seed production, i.e, weather cues: climate sensitivity profile, P-spline regression, sliding window analysis, and peak signal detection. Using long-term seed production [...]