Preprints
There are 3219 Preprints listed.
Status of Large Carnivores and Wild Ungulates in North and South Balaghat Forest Divisions
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Balaghat forest circle, comprising the North and South Balaghat Forest Divisions in Madhya Pradesh, forms a vital component of the Central India Landscape. Strategically positioned between the Kanha and Pench Tiger Reserves, the region serves as a critical corridor for tiger (Panthera tigris) dispersal and long term genetic connectivity and therefore contributes significantly to the stability [...]
Pinpointing Fragility: Integrating Resilience Indicators into Risk Evaluation
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ecosystems globally are increasingly threatened by climate change and human pressures, yet current ecosystem risk assessments predominantly emphasize exposure to stressors while overlooking intrinsic ecosystem resilience—the capacity to absorb and recover from disturbances. Here, we advocate for an integrated framework that explicitly incorporates resilience into ecosystem risk assessments and [...]
The number and changing global distribution of seagrass-proximate people
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Human Geography, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation
Seagrass meadows are increasingly recognised as critical natural capital, yet global seagrass conservation still lacks a basic human geography. Building on examples from forests, here, we provide the first global estimate of seagrass-proximate people, defined as people living within specified distances of known seagrass. We combined a global distribution layer of known, mapped and observed [...]
Record of male Dugong (Dugong dugon, Müller, 1776) in East Halmahera North Maluku Indonesia
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Dugong (Dugong dugon Müller, 1776) of the Order Sirenia is the only species of marine mammal in the family Dugongidae that inhabits tropical and subtropical waters of the Indo-Pacific (Nishiwaki and Marsh, 1985). Due to its slow life history and threats to its population, this species is listed as "Vulnerable" (VU) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (Marsh and Sobtzick, [...]
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 [...]
Making survival spatial: an integrated model for territory occupancy and capture-recapture data
Published: 2026-05-05
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Knowledge about spatial variation in survival is central to understanding population dynamics and guiding conservation, yet assessing it is very hard. This limitation arises because capture-mark-recapture (CMR) data required for such inference must be collected over large spatial extents, which is logistically demanding and seldom possible. By contrast, territory occupancy (TO) data are typically [...]
Distinguishing Between Fertilisation Failure and Early Embryo Death in Failed Sea Turtle Eggs
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Does the substrate on which cryptogams grow matter for limno-terrestrial meiofauna?
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Cryptogam habitats support a wide range of limno-terrestrial meiofauna, but the factors that shape their communities are still not well understood. The physical substrate that cryptogams grow on (e.g., soil, the base of a tree, or its trunk) can influence local moisture, temperature, and nutrient conditions, yet its role in structuring meiofaunal assemblages has rarely been tested systematically. [...]
Sounding out the river: an end-to-end framework for monitoring bioacoustic events and sediment movement in freshwater soundscapes
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite rivers’ cornerstone place in global biodiversity and the key ecosystem services they provide to human societies, their soundscapes are severely understudied. Three challenges are in part responsible for this gap: the active nature of rivers complicates deployment logistics, their structural noise hinders the detection of significant events, and occuring sounds are largely [...]
Species Field Theory: Discovery of Latent Ecological Structure from Community Time Series
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Population Biology
Ecological abundance time series are shaped not only by interactions among species, but also by broader community-level dynamics such as hidden resources and shared ecological constraints. We introduce Species Field Theory (SFT), a field-based framework for discovering latent ecological structure from abundance time series. SFT recovered directed interactions in a six-species Lotka--Volterra [...]
A Functionally Integrated Symbiotic System as a Mechanism for Angiosperm Diversification
Published: 2026-05-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Plant Sciences, Systems Biology
Flowering plants have maintained exceptionally high diversity for over 100 million years, yet the mechanisms enabling sustained macroevolutionary diversification remain unresolved. Classical theory predicts a trade-off between speciation and extinction, but angiosperms have repeatedly diversified while persisting across heterogeneous environments. Mutualistic interactions, pollination, seed [...]
Global patterns of vulnerability to wildlife exploitation in tropical birds and mammals
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Wildlife exploitation is one of the most pervasive anthropogenic pressures in tropical ecosystems and a major driver of vertebrate population declines, yet global assessments of species vulnerability to hunting remain spatially imprecise and methodologically inconsistent. We combine exposure to hunting with species-specific sensitivity and adaptive capacity to deliver a spatially explicit [...]
Resprouting responses to light environment and cutting season differ across resprouting stages and leaf habit in a heavy-snow Japanese beech forest.
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Resprouting is a key mechanism of recovery after aboveground damage and strongly influences forest regeneration and dynamics. This is also true in heavy-snow Japanese beech forests, where canopy-gap formation and snow pressure damage woody species. Understanding how light environment and disturbance season shape resprouting is therefore essential for interpreting life-history strategies and [...]
Sex differential effects of developmental heat stress on life-history and reproductive traits
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Global warming has led to increased mean global temperatures with projections suggesting continued warming throughout this century, posing an escalating threat to biological systems worldwide. Ectotherms are most vulnerable to this change as heat stress conditions can have severe implications on their development, mating interactions, and fitness. However, the sex-specific effects of [...]
Synthesis of Anthropogenic Impacts on Birds - Systematic Map and Bibliometric Analysis of Meta-Analyses
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Anthropogenic environmental change is a major driver of global bird declines, affecting species across continents, ecosystems, and life-history strategies. As such, it has drawn much attention in both primary research studies and meta-analyses. Because meta-analyses influence scientific consensus and conservation policy, it is essential to evaluate the representativeness and transparency of this [...]