Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Plant Sciences
Sniffing for fungi: Use of a conservation dog uncovers high regional truffle diversity
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Hypogeous aromatic fungi (‘truffles’) contribute significantly to overall fungal diversity but are difficult to find using traditional survey methods because they fruit underground, leading to under-documentation and a lack of understanding of truffle ecology. Truffles evolved to emit strong aromatic compounds to attract mycophagists for spore dispersal, a trait that culinary truffle harvesters [...]
Taming the dragon: genetic variation in wild and domesticated Antirrhinum majus
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Botany, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Horticulture, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Domesticated species and their wild relatives provide powerful case studies for examining the processes that shape rapid diversification. Here, we conduct a population genetic analysis of 31 domesticated varieties and 33 natural populations of the common snapdragon, Antirrhinum majus, a species in which closely related flower colour varieties form hybrid zones and display extensive variation in [...]
A mathematical foundation of modelling thermal injury and repair dynamics in ectotherms
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Evolution, Life Sciences, Physiology, Plant Sciences, Population Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Survival Analysis
As global temperatures rise and extreme heat events impair ectotherm performance and survival, it is becoming increasingly important to predict how organisms accumulate and repair thermal injury under realistic benign and stressful temperatures. The thermal death time (TDT) model quantifies how heat events translate into thermal injury, but under natural temperature fluctuations the TDT model is [...]
Cold treatment benefits Mediterranean orchid seedlings cultivated in vitro
Published: 2026-05-11
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
1. Effective ex situ propagation is increasingly critical for the conservation and restoration of terrestrial orchids threatened by habitat loss, over-collection and climate change. However, large-scale propagation remains constrained by developmental bottlenecks during the transition from protocorms to established plantlets with storage organs. Cold exposure is often recommended to improve [...]
The evolutionary link between food, condiments and medicine
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Anthropology, Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Food Science, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The deep relationship between humans and plants is of great interest to ethnobotanists, human ecologists, and evolutionary biologists. Humans have incorporated thousands of plant species into both traditional medicine and our diets, as foods and condiments. Many of these provide not only calories but also micronutrients and other bioactive compounds that contribute to health [1]. The boundaries [...]
Rethinking angiosperm diversification through the functional integration of mutualisms
Published: 2026-05-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Plant Sciences, Systems Biology
Flowering plants have maintained exceptional diversity for over 100 million years despite repeated environmental change and mass extinction events. A central challenge in plant macroevolution is understanding how lineages achieve both extensive diversification and long-term persistence. While pollination, seed dispersal, and mycorrhizal symbioses are recognized as key drivers of plant evolution, [...]
Representational limits in detecting ecological change
Published: 2026-04-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Biotechnology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Food Science, Forest Sciences, Genetics and Genomics, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Other Life Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Physiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Systems Biology
Detecting ecological change remains a persistent challenge, even in systems with extensive monitoring data and increasingly sophisticated analytical tools. Uncertainty is usually attributed to stochasticity, limited observations, or imperfect models. Here, I argue that an additional and largely overlooked constraint arises from representational limits: systematic ways in which graphs, indicators, [...]
MASTHING: a process-based model of mast seeding in European beech
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Physiology, Plant Sciences
Masting, the synchronised interannual variation in seed production, shapes forest regeneration and many ecosystem processes, yet process-based models remain underdeveloped. Here we introduce MASTHING (MASting THeory modellING), an individual-tree model coupling phenology, carbon gain, resource storage, temperature cues, and environmental vetoes on reproduction. We parameterised MASTHING for [...]
Molecular identification and diversity assessment of Tyrrhenian Romulea species (iridaceae)
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Plant Sciences
Taxonomic assignments based only on morphology are often insufficient for delimiting species, particularly in polyploid complexes with extensive morphological overlap. This limitation hinders biogeographic and conservation issues. The genus Romulea (Iridaceae), distributed across Africa and the Mediterranean Basin, exemplifies this challenge. Despite its remarkable diversity, Mediterranean [...]
Vegetation responses to managed river flow events and regimes
Published: 2026-04-02
Subjects: Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Vegetation communities are an important part of riverine ecosystems and can be severely impacted by changed flow conditions in regulated waterways, making them a priority for waterway management. Environmental flows are a commonly used tool to mitigate some of the impacts from regulated flow regimes and provide benefits to vegetation communities. Ongoing and effective use of environmental flows [...]
The scent of survival in a warming world: how monoterpenes drive thermal adaptation in thyme
Published: 2026-03-18
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Plant Sciences, Physiology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Population Biology
1 Monoterpenes are key plant secondary metabolites with well known defensive and ecological functions, yet their role in abiotic stress tolerance remains poorly understood. In many Mediterranean plants, monoterpene composition varies markedly within and among species and is associated with climatic gradients, suggesting that these compounds may mediate plant responses to extreme heat. 2 We [...]
Influence of fire history on reproductive traits in a congeneric obligate seeder and facultative resprouter tree species
Published: 2026-02-20
Subjects: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Sciences
In fire-prone regions globally, evolution of plant traits that confer resilience to historical fire regimes is widespread. However, many common plant species are currently declining due to a mismatch between historical and contemporary fire regimes. These changes threaten long term community trajectories of plants and the animal species relying on them for food or habitat. Understanding plant [...]
The origins and diversification of hummingbird pollination in Bromeliaceae
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Plant Sciences
Bromeliaceae are a model group for understanding explosive Neotropical diversification, combining remarkable ecological breadth and high species richness, despite relatively recent evolutionary origins. Multiple drivers are hypothesised to accelerate bromeliad diversification, and hummingbird pollination is frequently proposed to be among the strongest. However, our understanding has been limited [...]
Evaluating the vulnerability of critical early life stages in plants during heat extremes
Published: 2025-12-30
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Plants, their seeds, and their gametes show remarkable resilience and responsiveness to environmental conditions. However, worsening climate change with more severe and frequent extreme climatic events, like heatwaves and hot droughts, will likely push beyond physiological limits of many species. If such events occur during important points of development and reproduction – rather than mature [...]
Evolving on two fronts: Oak species and syngameons
Published: 2025-12-16
Subjects: Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
William ‘Bill’ Burger wrote in 1975, “I believe that the classical species-concept in Quercus defines a very real population system and that it evolves on two fronts. One is that of continuing to adapt to a niche that differs slightly from its close relations. The second is in sharing the broader evolutionary advances of these same close relations that together comprise the genetically [...]