Preprints
There are 3891 Preprints listed.
Resurrecting host–microbiome interactions: combining resurrection ecology and microbiome transplants to test temporal local adaptation
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Host-associated microbiomes can influence fitness, respond rapidly to environmental change, and potentially contribute to host adaptation. Yet, determining whether host–microbiome associations evolve adaptively over ecological timescales remains challenging because historical host genotypes and their associated microbial communities are rarely available for experimental comparison. Resurrection [...]
Mixed evidence that protected areas slow declines of threatened plant species in Germany
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. A central credo of plant conservation is that the most effective way to protect native plants is to conserve the habitats in which they occur. Protected areas are therefore a cornerstone of plant conservation, and much research has focused on optimizing their representativeness across species. Far fewer studies, however, have tested whether protected populations actually persist over time. [...]
The Illusion of Structural Gain: Identifiability and estimator calibration in a bounded energy-structure model
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Systems Biology
In evolutionary biology and ecological modeling, inferring adaptive shifts or structural gain from time-series data is critical for understanding system resilience under resource constraints. However, the mathematical estimators used to diagnose these shifts can produce fundamentally misleading scalar metrics. This paper demonstrates the "illusion of structural gain" in bounded energy-structure [...]
Co-producing biodiversity data infrastructures: Mexico’s Agrobiodiversity Information System as a case study
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Science and Technology Studies
Agrobiodiversity data, rooted in place and in community, expose tensions around sustaining the involvement of data collectors across the data lifecycle and embedding their context-specific expertise as data are mobilized beyond their sites of origin. These challenges extend to biodiversity data infrastructures that integrate diverse socio-ecological information. We examine how a co-production [...]
Cave spider trophic dynamics, network structure and competition: cave zone, taxonomy and bat presence drive hypogean interactions
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology
Cave ecosystems are shaped by unique environmental constraints, influencing species distributions and trophic interactions. Spiders are often the dominant predators in caves, but their diet is restricted by local parameters that likely intensify competition and other intraguild interactions, including the confinement of energy flows to detrital and chemoautotrophic pathways. The hypogean [...]
Evaluating AI agents on the IUCN Red List assessor exam: Tradeoffs and opportunities for AI assistants in extinction risk assessments
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Computer Sciences
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is the world's most widely used system for assessing the global extinction risk of species, underpinning conservation policy and action worldwide. However, due to funding constraints and limited assessor capacity, the Red List faces significant gaps in species coverage (less than 20% of plant species have been assessed) and challenges in keeping assessments [...]
Bio-CPC: Collective Predictive Computation in Biological Organization
Published: 2026-11-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Biological organization is characterized by hierarchically nested levels in which relatively autonomous units become integrated into higher-order systems. Major evolutionary transitions such as multicellularity and eusociality therefore raise a common problem: how can locally informed, goal-directed units coordinate heterogeneous responses so that they collectively support a larger whole? Here, [...]
The Apparent Urban Advance in Juvenile Vulpes vulpes Observations Diminishes after Accounting for Switzerland's Elevational Structure
Published: 2026-11-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Urbanization can alter wildlife life cycles, but comparisons between more and less urbanized environments may be confounded by other environmental gradients. This study analyzed 4295 human-reported observations of \textit{Vulpes vulpes} from 496 generalized \(5 \times 5\ \mathrm{km}\) cells across Switzerland between 2018 and 2024 to estimate when the probability that a spring record contained [...]
Exploring exploration: A multidimensional analysis of exploration across standardised and semi-natural contexts in rats
Published: 2026-11-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Exploration is a major personality trait in animals that reflects individual differences in gathering information about environmental features relevant to survival and reproduction. Yet, exploration is commonly assessed using brief standardised tests, which provide a convenient but artificial experimental setting. Whether such measures reflect how individuals explore complex and changing [...]
Who should still peer-review, for whom, and with what tools?
Published: 2026-11-02
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Education, Engineering, Law, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In drafting On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin developed his thoughts through extensive correspondence with trusted colleagues, seeking feedback on ideas, manuscripts, and proofs. This informal peer-review process, like many others of its time, was based on personal trust, academic respect, and reputation rather than guided by any institution, and it helped pave the way for modern peer [...]
Recognising patterns of vulnerability in a seagrass-dependent social-ecological system to support place-based management
Published: 2026-11-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Human Geography, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Seagrass social-ecological systems are increasingly demonstrated to contribute to the well-being, livelihood opportunities and local economies of millions of people across coastlines globally. Seagrasses are also recognised for supporting endangered, culturally significant biodiversity and fisheries species. In the Palk Bay, Tamil Nadu region of southern India, we use a vulnerability framework to [...]
Pedigree metrics: What are they good for?
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Estimating additive genetic variance (V_A) is key to understanding evolutionary potential in wild populations. V_A is commonly estimated using relatedness data from pedigrees in so-called `animal models'. The accuracy of these estimates depends strongly on information in the pedigree. Typically metrics describing pedigree structure (such as the number of individuals, maternities, pedigree depth [...]
Ancient human occupation alters modern forest traits, structure and biomass in neotropical forests.
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
There is considerable debate as to how extensively neotropical forests were shaped by ancient people. This uncertainty has implications for the global carbon cycle because forest plots may be disproportionately located in formerly occupied areas, potentially biasing estimates of tropical forest growth and carbon uptake. Ground measurements within the formerly occupied Maya city of Xmakabatun [...]
Researchers as predators: are field biologists altering traits of the populations that they study?
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Field biologists rarely directly measure the long-term impact of their work on the populations they study. However, heavy or repeated sampling (with or without release) could potentially alter population traits and even bias study conclusions. Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata) are a frequently-studied species in evolutionary biology, particularly in the context of variation in predation. [...]
The spatial dynamics of nutrient limitation in communities of generalist predators of crop pests
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Nutrition, Zoology
Generalist arthropod predators vitally control crop pests, but their ability to perform this role relies on them obtaining sufficient nutrients within simplified crop environments. Field margins are thought to provide habitat and resources for predators, such as ground beetles, but how far into fields this provision extends is poorly understood. Since arthropod nutrient contents can vary [...]