Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Statistical Models
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 [...]
A data-driven assessment of the global community structure of pelagic zooplankton biomass
Published: 2026-06-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Statistical Models
Aim: Zooplankton often dominate pelagic metazoan biomass, making them a central component of marine ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles. In this study, we aimed to: (1) provide biomass distributions of zooplankton functional types to support marine ecosystem monitoring and biogeochemical model evaluation; and (2) investigate regional and seasonal patterns of biomass across marine zooplankton [...]
Modelling habitat selection using tracking data from central place foraging species: A practical guide for ecologists
Published: 2026-06-04
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Behavior and Ethology, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
The study of habitat selection has long been at the heart of ecological research and is critical to deciphering the mechanisms that govern species’ responses to global change. This is particularly important for central place foraging species, whose ability to adapt to shifting environmental conditions and anthropogenic disturbance is limited by persistent attachment to a fixed site. Recent [...]
Multi-scale collapse of coral cover under climate change
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Biology, Dynamic Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Marine Biology, Mathematics, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Survival Analysis, Systems Biology
Projecting ecosystem trajectories under future climates is critical for conservation planning, yet remains constrained by uncertainty arising from limited data, ecological complexity, and biological and environmental variability. Variability, when disentangled from uncertainty, offers critical insights into population and community dynamics. For example, enhanced vital rates (growth, survival, [...]
Efficient Bayesian implementations of capture-recapture models with Stan
Published: 2026-04-02
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Survival Analysis
Capture-recapture (CR) methods are a mainstay of ecological statistics for estimating demographic parameters and population sizes in animal populations. The advent of Bayesian methods made complex hierarchical formulations accessible to practitioners, largely relying on conditional likelihood formulations with latent discrete parameters. However, modern gradient-based MCMC methods that are the [...]
One Toolbox, Many Tools: A Practitioner’s Guide to Latent Variable Modelling for Community Ecology
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Multivariate Analysis, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
In this article, we present the case for Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models (GLLVMs) as a go-to choice of statistical method for any community ecologist wanting to tackle a range of present-day ecological research questions. GLLVMs bring tools and capabilities from classic (mixed-effects) regression models to multivariate community analysis, providing a number of novel ways to tailor [...]
Methods for the integrated meta-analysis of mean and variation effects
Published: 2026-01-08
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
Meta-analyses in ecology and evolution typically focus on population means via effect sizes such as the log response ratio. Recently, there has been interest in quantifying effects on variability using the log variability ratio and the log coefficient of variation ratio. Until now, testing for the effects on group means and variabilities has necessitated two separate models. We present a workflow [...]
Dispersion tests in generalized linear mixed-effects models: a methods comparison and practical guide for ecologists
Published: 2025-11-14
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistical Models
Underdispersion and overdispersion are common issues when analysing ecological data with generalized linear (mixed) models (GLMs/GLMMs). Overdispersion, the phenomenon where observations spread wider than expected by the fitted model, usually leads to anti-conservative p-values and, thus, to inflated type I error. In contrast, underdispersion, a narrower spread of the data than expected, causes [...]
Causal models as a scientific framework for next-generation ecosystem and climate-linked stock assessments
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Rapid changes in marine ecosystems highlight the need to account for time-varying productivity in stock assessment models used to support fisheries management. Common approaches incorporate annual variation or regress processes like recruitment, natural mortality, or growth on environmental covariates. While the latter represents a step towards biological realism, it often fails accounting for [...]
Toward Ecological Forecasting of West Nile Virus in Florida: Insights from Two Decades of Surveillance
Published: 2025-05-20
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Models, Virus Diseases
West Nile Virus (WNV) is the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the United States, yet transmission activity remains difficult to predict. This study used 20 years of digitized WNV seroconversion data from 526 sentinel chicken coops across Florida to develop spatiotemporal models with landscape and climate variables to predict WNV seroconversion at monthly and seasonal timescales. We [...]
Sunlight and diel behaviors promote coexistence of frogs through temporal acoustic partitioning
Published: 2024-08-12
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Understanding how species coexist is one of the main goals in ecology. While many have documented how species coexist in nature, there is much interspecific and spatial heterogeneity in which resources are partitioned and in the contributing environmental factors. Overall, we lack a general understanding of how stable coexistence is maintained for particular groups of organisms. Thus, we studied [...]
Three Paths Through the Levels of Selection
Published: 2024-08-08
Subjects: Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Statistical Models, Zoology
An integrated population modelling workflow for supporting mesopredator management
Published: 2024-08-01
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Survival Analysis, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Expanding populations of mesopredators threaten biodiversity and human health in many ecosystems across the world. Lethal control through harvest is commonly implemented as a mitigation measure, yet its effects on mesopredator population dynamics in interaction with compensatory mechanisms and environmental conditions has rarely been assessed quantitatively due to data constraints. Recent [...]
Large-scale spatio-temporal variation in vital rates and population dynamics of an alpine bird
Published: 2024-02-01
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Statistical Models
Quantifying temporal and spatial variation in animal population size and demography is a central theme in ecological research and important for directing management and policy. However, this requires field sampling at large spatial extents and over long periods of time, which is not only prohibitively costly but often politically untenable. Participatory monitoring programs (also called citizen [...]
A big data and machine learning approach for monitoring the condition of ecosystems
Published: 2024-01-16
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecosystems are highly valuable as a source of goods and services and as a heritage for future generations. Knowing their condition is extremely important for all management and conservation activities and public policies. Until now, the evaluation of ecosystem condition has been unsatisfactory and thus lacks practical implementation for most countries. We propose that ecosystem integrity is a [...]