Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Population Biology
Do harbour porpoise mortality records reflect living population structure? A matrix population model diagnostic
Published: 2026-03-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Effective conservation of marine mammals depends on reliable demographic information, yet acquiring such data for highly mobile cetaceans is challenging. Harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) are widely used as sentinel species, but much of what is known about their demography comes from opportunistic sources, such as stranding and bycatch records. While invaluable, these data may be subject to [...]
The Individualised Niche in Motion; quantifying individualised niches with movement data
Published: 2026-02-26
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Individuals of the same species often differ consistently in their use of resources, their responses to environmental gradients, and their movement decisions. Between-individual variation across niche axes has been shown to have important ecological consequences. Yet practical frameworks that translate modern tracking data into operational, comparable measures of niche individual specialisation [...]
Beyond Observed Diversity: A Completeness-Based Invasion Theory
Published: 2026-02-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Charles Elton proposed that species-rich communities resist invasion better, but support is mainly from local studies, possibly because studies use observed richness alone, ignoring the dark diversity. I propose Completeness-Based Invasion Theory, linking invasibility inversely to community completeness, an index linking observed and dark diversity, enabling unified insights across scales.
Social organisation predicts lifespan in mammals
Published: 2026-02-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
1. Recent comparative analyses have identified positive associations between social organisation and longevity in mammals, but independent replication with larger datasets is needed to establish the robustness of this pattern. 2. Here, we analysed maximum recorded lifespan, body mass, and social organisation data for 1,436 mammal species using Bayesian phylogenetic comparative methods, confirming [...]
A macroevolutionary gene network reveals diapause evolutionary dynamics beyond the circadian clock and predicts microevolution
Published: 2026-02-16
Subjects: Computational Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Other Genetics and Genomics, Population Biology
Diapause is an alternative developmental pathway evolved independently in many insects to synchronize life cycles with resource abundance. While subsets of this essential phenotype have long been studied at a single species level, the genomic basis of the full diapause syndrome remains poorly understood. Remaining unknown is whether convergent diapause syndromes employ shared mechanisms. This [...]
Should hunters fear the wolf? Effects of wolf recolonization on ungulate harvests in a multi-species European landscape
Published: 2026-02-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Zoology
1. The recolonization of European landscapes by the gray wolf Canis lupus raises questions about the ecological effects of predators and their impact on human interests such as large-game hunting bags, leaving room for alarmism among hunters. 2. We investigated the impact of wolf on recreational hunting by using long-term (2006-2023) and high-resolution (234 hunting districts) hunting bag data on [...]
Predicting demographic impacts from sublethal cumulative effects of offshore renewable developments on breeding seabirds
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology, Population Biology
1. Offshore renewable developments (ORDs) are often located in habitat used by protected seabird species and may cause sublethal effects by altering movement patterns and displacing individuals from key resources. Predicting how these effects translate into population-level impacts is challenging for long-lived species because demographic consequences emerge from complex, state-dependent [...]
Population dynamics and disease-linked host use of the sea urchin symbiont Dactylopleustes yoshimurai (Crustacea: Amphipoda: Pleustidae) on Strongylocentrotus intermedius
Published: 2026-01-29
Subjects: Marine Biology, Population Biology
Dactylopleustes yoshimurai is an echinoid-associated amphipod that frequently aggregates on disease lesions of the short-spined urchin Strongylocentrotus intermedius in Otsuchi Bay, northeastern Japan. However, its life history and use of diseased hosts remain poorly understood. We combined four years of monthly SCUBA surveys (Jan 2020–Jan 2024) with quantitative sampling of diseased and healthy [...]
Inspiring systematic inclusion of individual animal states to enhance the quality of research
Published: 2026-01-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Studies on animals continue to attract criticism over data quality, reproducibility and generality of findings, yet one source of variation remains rarely addressed: differences in individuals’ affective states. In this paper, we suggest that evaluating affect should be considered standard good practice in ecological and behavioural research with wild animals, alongside familiar variables such as [...]
How does the rate of environmental change affect density-dependent population dynamics?
Published: 2026-01-20
Subjects: Dynamic Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Population Biology
Natural populations experience variable environments. Anthropogenically driven environmental change, in particular, is expected to impose trends on key demographic parameters such as reproduction and survival. Theoretical studies of how such environmental changes affect populations have highlighted dynamical phenomena including bifurcation-related tipping points – typically identified by [...]
The role of barrier zones in controlling invasive species: A microcosm experiment
Published: 2026-01-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Around the world, invasive species have altered ecosystems, entailing both social and economic consequences. Further, preventing and controlling their spread requires high costs. One common approach to control invasive species is through barrier zones. A barrier zone is a region surrounding an initial invasion where management of the invasive species is conducted, including direct harvesting. [...]
Ecological examples of nonstationarity, nonlinearity, and statistical interactions in dynamic structural equation models
Published: 2026-01-14
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecologists are adapting structural causal modelling for spatial, phylogenetic, and time-series analysis. However, ecological extensions of path analysis and structural equation models (SEM) typically assume that interactions (“path coefficients”) are stationary, linear, and additive, while ecological and evolutionary dynamics are often nonstationary, nonlinear, and include statistical [...]
From patterns to predictions: A framework for the spatial epidemiology of wildlife diseases
Published: 2025-12-09
Subjects: Animal Diseases, Biodiversity, Epidemiology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Statistics and Probability, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Veterinary Preventive Medicine, Epidemiology, and Public Health, Zoology
Wildlife diseases pose a significant threat to public health, livestock, and biodiversity conservation. In this context, spatial epidemiology offers a robust framework for elucidating disease dynamics and informing policy-making and disease management. The workflow in spatial epidemiology involves three main steps: (1) descriptive analysis of spatial dynamics; (2) exploration of the observed [...]
Barking up the wrong tree? Indian street dog woes are emblematic of ecological governance failures for multispecies coexistence
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
On August 11, 2025, India’s Supreme Court mandated relocating 2.5 million dogs to address bites and zoonotic disease/death concerns—but reversed course twice since then—revealing that solutions require sequential waste management, education, and sterilization that prioritize addressing root demographic and behavioral drivers over reactive management.
Recolonisation dynamics of grey wolves: delayed recovery in a Central European country
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Population Biology, Zoology
Grey wolves have been recovering throughout Europe over the last decades, widely portrayed as a conservation success story. We evaluated the trends and demography of two wolf populations that recolonised the Czech Republic between 2011/2012 and 2022/2023, integrating a variety of fieldwork and laboratory methods including snow tracking, camera trapping, telemetry and non-invasive genetics, with [...]