Preprints
There are 2692 Preprints listed.
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 [...]
Climate change increases the distribution of reservoirs of the Raccoon Rabies Virus in Quebec
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Zoonoses often emerge in environments where human-animal interactions intensify. In Québec, climate change and land use alterations are suspected drivers in the shifts of the potential distribution of urban-adapted hosts such as raccoons (Procyon lotor) and striped skunks (Mephitis mephitis), which serve as reservoirs for Raccoon Rabies Virus (RRV; a variant of Lyssavirus rabies). We used species [...]
TwisstNTern 2: Ternary analysis of topology weights from tree sequences
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Recent advances in genealogical inference now allow the reconstruction of genome-wide sequences of trees for large sets of samples, providing detailed records of how evolutionary relationships vary along the genome. Tree sequences encode a vast amount of information, but new approaches are needed to extract relevant patterns and make inferences. TwisstNtern is a program for visualising and [...]
How much monitoring is needed to reliably track progress towards genetic diversity targets?
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Population Biology
Achieving global biodiversity targets hinges on indicators of biodiversity change that convert raw data into reliable numbers that can shape policy, conservation, management, and, ultimately, the future of biodiversity worldwide. Indicators can only be used confidently if they detect and summarise biodiversity trends as intended, given the available data worldwide. Knowing whether indicators can [...]
High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza in Pinniped Conservation
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Since 2020, H5Nx highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses (HPAIVs) have caused widespread disruptions not only to global agriculture and trade but also to the health of free-ranging wildlife. Pinnipeds have experienced greater mortality from H5Nx HPAIV than any other mammalian taxa. Emergent virus strains, persisting over long time periods and vast geographic distances, have repeatedly triggered [...]
Emerging Applications of Large Language Models in Ecology and Conservation Science
Published: 2025-11-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) marks a major development in artificial intelligence, with potentially transformative implications for ecology and conservation science. Built on advanced deep-learning architectures, these models can support a wide range of tasks, from analysing unstructured texts to enhancing biodiversity monitoring and generating policy-relevant insights. This [...]
A century of invertebrate range extensions in the eastern North Pacific
Published: 2025-11-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aim Understanding the fundamental drivers of species’ range edges has been a core question in ecology and biogeography for centuries and has taken on new urgency in the Anthropocene. Yet range edges can rapidly shift over large distances, complicating long-term study of their dynamics. This is especially true in marine systems, where ranges may move hundreds of kilometers from one year to the [...]
The statistical fragility of animal cognition findings: a meta-meta-analytic reappraisal
Published: 2025-11-06
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Comparative Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Psychology
How reliable is the evidence in animal cognition research? Concerns are mounting over the statistical robustness of this and other fields. Many primary studies rely on small samples and rarely report null results, while meta-analyses sometimes overlook publication bias, all of which may contribute to unreliable conclusions. We conducted a second-order meta-analysis across 28 published [...]
Relativistic Ecological Dynamics: An Empirical Investigation of its Geometric Properties
Published: 2025-11-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
The foundational models of population dynamics, such as those by Lotka and Volterra, presuppose a static, Euclidean phase space where interactions are governed by fixed forces. The theory of Biorelativity challenges this, positing that dynamics are better described as geodesics on a manifold whose geometry is actively shaped by the system’s state and external forcings. This study gives [...]
Multilevel Selection Shaping Adaptive Social Networks
Published: 2025-11-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Human Ecology, Zoology
Understanding how human and non-human animal social networks evolve through emergent properties and feedback mechanisms is essential for explaining their adaptability and persistence. Collective social niche construction refers to the process where individuals, through their interactions, actively shape the social environment, resulting in network structures that influence individual behaviours [...]
Carrion decomposition in a subtropical forest biodiversity experiment
Published: 2025-11-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Tree species richness promotes the diversity of higher trophic levels and ecosystem functioning. Tree species richness may thus also affect communities of insect decomposers, and through this, accelerate the decomposition of animal carrion. However, these effects might be masked by other factors driving decomposition, such as forest structure, topography, and competition between different [...]
Relativity for the Realm of the Living: a geometric framework for eco-evolutionary dynamics
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Abstract: Biological systems are here reinterpreted through a geometric lens that extends the insight of general relativity: organisms and their interactions are modelled as deformations of a multidimensional biological hyperspace. In this view, each entity acts as a source that locally bends a relational field defined by molecular, morphofunctional and ecological axes, thereby altering the [...]
Penguin diet from space: Links between sea ice, Antarctic food webs, and population change
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Rapid environmental change poses a threat to Antarctic ecosystems. However, the spatial scale of Antarctica and its extreme environment have precluded a synoptic understanding of the links between environmental change and ecological responses. Combining tools from imaging spectroscopy, stable isotope analysis, and hierarchical statistical modeling, we developed a novel method to quantify Adélie [...]
An increase in animal diversity was facilitated by ecologically-driven brain complexity throughout the Cambrian
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Developmental Biology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Other Genetics and Genomics, Zoology
The Cambrian Explosion is often seen as a singular event requiring an explanation. In fact, it is better represented as a cascade of linked events, each with numerous causes. The iconic middle Cambrian fauna, represented by sites such as the Burgess Shale, is a culmination of several phases of increases in taxonomic diversity and morphological complexity. I focus on an often-overlooked increase [...]
RevSyntax enables an efficient workflow for RevBayes analysis in VS Code
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
RevBayes—a phylogenetic probabilistic graphical modeling software—presents prospective users with a steep learning curve. RevBayes lacks a custom integrated development environment (IDE) to facilitate writing and executing code, and as a result many users end up copying and pasting individual lines of code from a text editor into a terminal window. This inefficient and error-prone process limits [...]