Preprints
There are 3798 Preprints listed.
Reversing in situ crop genetic diversity loss through incentive-based conservation
Published: 2026-10-16
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Environmental Studies, Food Science, Other Economics
Crop genetic diversity underpins the adaptive capacity of food systems but is declining. Maintaining diversity is challenging because most crop varieties underperform the best-suited ones under current conditions, therefore the private value of currently low-yielding varieties to farmers is limited. However they may carry traits that become critical as conditions change, so their public value as [...]
Ecosystem-based harvest strategies in regional fisheries management
Published: 2026-10-16
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Life Sciences
Fisheries have complex effects on the dynamics and structure of marine ecosystems. Single-stock management in isolation can cause ecosystems to deviate from desired states and fail to achieve both single-stock and ecosystem-wide objectives. This can be addressed through ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM), including ecosystem harvest strategies. We benchmarked the state of development of [...]
Shelterbelts: A Python library for characterising farmland tree groups and their influence on nearby pasture and cropland
Published: 2026-10-16
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Shelterbelts is an open source Python library for mapping and categorising groups of trees in agricultural landscapes, and the corresponding shelter provided to nearby pixels based on the wind direction or density of tree cover. Starting from a binary tree raster, pixels are labelled into ecologically meaningful categories based on their structure and location including: scattered trees, forest [...]
The unequal burden of biodiversity reporting
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Discussions around the first review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework reveal how the pursuit of more comprehensive measurement can obscure a challenge that will define the post-2030 agenda: ensuring that all countries and stakeholders are able to participate in and be represented by the systems used to evaluate global progress.
Stridulation rate as a thermometer in Tettigonia viridissima: a season-long automated record and a test against archive recordings
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
That an insect's song rate follows its temperature has been known since Dolbear proposed reading a cricket as a thermometer in 1897. The relation is not in doubt; its functional form is. Walker (1975a) found stridulation rate approximately linear in ten species of Orchelimum and, reanalysing fifteen published datasets, found linear fits better than exponential in thirteen — but his data were [...]
Elevation gradients shape morphology and acoustic phenotype across isolated songbird populations
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ornithology
Elevational gradients provide natural experiments for examining how environmental variation shapes animal phenotypes. In birds, geographic variation in body size may also influence song frequency because vocal production is constrained by morphology. We tested whether elevation and temperature are associated with coordinated variation in morphology and song frequency in Berthelot’s pipit (Anthus [...]
The acoustic structure and possible mechanical origin of the male Corncrake call
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
The male Corncrake Crex crex produces a distinctive repetitive call whose acoustic structure suggests a mechanically constrained sound-production system rather than a conventional tonal vocalisation. Here I describe observations obtained from approximately 800 field recordings made on Skye between 2020 and 2026 and develop a testable hypothesis for the origin of the long-duration and repetitive [...]
Dietary models of primate brain evolution omit the gut microbiome
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
DeCasien et al. reported that diet, rather than sociality, predicts relative brain size across primates, with frugivores having larger brains than folivores. Their interpretation moves the discussion from sociality towards ecology yet leaves the proposed energetic link biologically unspecified. The matter arising from this dietary framework is gut microbial metabolism, a plausible mechanistic [...]
Beyond the Vertebrate Model: Insights from Insect Stress Responses
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Behavioral Neurobiology, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Genetics, Molecular Genetics, Systems Biology, Zoology
Stress responses are essential for survival, coordinating behavioural, physiological and molecular adjustments that enable organisms to cope with challenges. Most research has focused on vertebrates, leaving invertebrate stress physiology comparatively underexplored, particularly in insects. In this review, we compare insect and vertebrate stress responses to examine what insects reveal about the [...]
Geographic blind spots in an extreme environment microbiome catalog
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Jiang et al. present the Extreme Environment Microbiome Catalog (EEMC), comprising 78,213 bacterial and archaeal genomes, as a global resource for microbial diversity and antimicrobial discovery. Its scale and experimental peptide characterization are substantial contributions. However, a global framing requires evidence that regional data were systematically sought, rather than simply [...]
Bird community change only partially matches landscape habitat change across five decades in North America
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
A common expectation is that as habitats in a landscape change, so do communities within them. However, this niche-based expectation assumes species persist in their favored habitats regardless of how much habitat remains; geometric constraints can counter this when heterogeneous landscapes supply too little of each habitat type for specialists to persist, allowing generalists to dominate. Using [...]
Exploring fungal invasions: observational and theoretical insights and unanswered questions
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite invasive fungi’s dramatic effects on native biodiversity and ecosystem processes, the extent of fungal invasions and the mechanisms behind them are unclear. We address this gap by synthesizing documented global macrofungal invasions to assess which fungal traits and lifestyles contribute to invasions across fungal guilds. Specifically, we analyze global observations of non-native fungi to [...]
The Openness–Constraint Spectrum: Module Integrity and the Evolutionary Reversibility of Fungal Traits
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fungal traits differ sharply in whether evolution can retrace its steps. Hymenophore morphologies transition bidirectionally across phylogenies, whereas gasteroid fruiting bodies, arbuscular mycorrhizal symbioses, and obligate parasitism show little or no macroevolutionary return. We propose module integrity — the preservation state of a gene regulatory module relative to its ancestral baseline — [...]
Halophyte-associated salt-tolerant rhizobacteria: ecological adaptation, mechanistic pathways, and translational relevance for wheat salinity tolerance
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Background Soil salinization is an expanding constraint to agricultural productivity worldwide, particularly in irrigated and arid regions and strongly limits wheat growth and yield. Although breeding and biotechnology have produced cultivars with improved ion-exclusion and tissue-level tolerance, these advances alone do not fully mitigate salinity-induced disruptions in rhizosphere processes and [...]
Changepoint detection methods as a practical tool for assessment of ecological restoration
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Statistics and Probability
1. A key aim of many conservation initiatives is to induce a change, however detecting change from monitoring data can be challenging. Here, we introduce statistical methods for changepoint detection, demonstrating how this under-utilised analytical approach can provide practitioners and researchers insight and help in planning ecological restoration projects. 2. We show why it is important to [...]