Preprints
There are 3389 Preprints listed.
A self tuning sliding window method for detecting phenotype linked regional poly-methylation architecture in sparse wildlife methylomes
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Despite featuring extreme physiological adaptations integration of wildlife species into the modern ‘omics’ frameworks are limited due to the sparsity in the data. To address the sparsity limitation a self-tuning sliding-window framework was developed for the identification of the regional poly-CpG methylation architecture associated with phenotypic traits. Under the framework the iteratively [...]
An individual-based model for white storks (Ciconia ciconia) in Germany during breeding season
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ornithology
Understanding how habitat selection influences individual fitness is essential for predicting species responses to environmental change. Resource Selection Functions (RSFs) are widely used to quantify habitat preferences, but they often overlook individual variation and rarely link habitat use to demographic outcomes. We combined empirical habitat-selection modelling with a spatially explicit [...]
Applying participatory, integrated, and biodiversity-inclusive spatial planning across realms: insights from three European social-ecological systems
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Over the past two decades, a large body of knowledge on decision-support frameworks has evolved facilitating decision makers to plan for reaching biodiversity goals articulated in international policy agreements. Here, we adapted a structured decision making framework to operationalize Participatory, Integrated, and Biodiversity-Inclusive Spatial Planning (PI-BISP), providing a practical pathway [...]
Invasion impacts vary across the diel cycle: hemipterans supercharge ant ecosystem functions and restructure local invertebrate communities
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biological invasions threaten biodiversity and ecosystem functions, often causing cascading effects across trophic levels. Yet how these impacts vary over the fundamental day–night cycle remains largely overlooked. On Barrow Island, a high-conservation-value reserve off northwestern Australia, we examined how infestations of the non-native scale insect Saissetia miranda (Hemiptera: Coccidae) on a [...]
Joint species distributions reveal crop type and field-specific assembly rules and idiosyncrasies in carabid beetle occurrences and abundances
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Designing effective biodiversity conservation and pest regulation strategies in agroecosystems requires understanding how environmental gradients and assembly rules jointly structure ecological communities. 2. We fitted a hurdle joint species distribution model (jSDM) to presence–absence and conditional abundance data of 20 carabid species sampled across 57 arable fields in three French [...]
Avian Population Genomics: Latest Findings and Future Prospects
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Birds are one of the most recognizable and diverse groups of organisms on Earth. This group has played an important role in many fields, including the development of methods in behavioral ecology and evolutionary theory. The use of population genomics took off following the increased accessibility of high-throughput sequencing across taxa. Several features of bird genomes make them particularly [...]
Natural history models of bird–building collisions
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Building collisions kill an estimated 1.28–5.19 billion birds annually in North America, making them the second leading cause of human-related avian mortality. Yet the behavioral and ecological drivers of collisions remain difficult to disentangle, as most knowledge derives from carcass surveys rather than direct observations. Here, we propose a conceptual framework that synthesizes four natural [...]
Geospatial tree species prediction using multi-view drone imagery and computer vision
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
Imagery from uncrewed aerial vehicles (“drones”) is an increasingly popular modality for understanding forests at a large scale due to its relatively low cost and ability to be collected on demand. Computational tools to identify the location of individual trees and their species can inform forest management efforts, such as prioritizing regions to thin to reduce wildfire risk. Previous work on [...]
Within-Community-Sampling Power Analysis to Detect Richness Change
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Reliable biodiversity monitoring requires understanding how sampling effort influences detectability of meaningful changes in species richness. Increased sampling within independent units has been shown to reduce measurement error, while sampled richness estimates are often subject to bias. However, robust methods for quantifying the relationship between sampling effort and the power to detect [...]
Choosing the Response Matrix: Generalised Linear Latent Variable Models for Multivariate Ecology and Evolution
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Multivariate responses are central to ecology and evolutionary biology, but their covariance is often difficult to model and interpret. Generalised linear latent variable models (GLLVMs) provide a parsimonious way to represent covariance among many responses using a smaller number of latent variables. They are widely used for Site X Species data in joint species distribution modelling and [...]
Capsicum pubescens Ruiz & Pav.: evolutionary history, genetic resources and future opportunities for an overlooked Andean chile
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Growing concerns over food security, agrobiodiversity loss, and climate change are driving renewed interest in neglected and underutilized crops with high agronomic, nutritional, and adaptive potential. Capsicum pubescens Ruiz & Pav. is one of the five domesticated chile pepper species and a distinctive crop of Andean agriculture. Adapted to cool mountain environments and characterized by its [...]
A new computational framework for speeding up the fitting of multistate capture–mark–recapture models
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
1. Multistate capture–mark–recapture (CMR) models are widely used to estimate the parameters governing demographic processes such as survival, dispersal, and recruitment in animal populations. In Bayesian analyses, the multinomial likelihood of multistate CMR models summarizes individual encounter histories into groups defined by states and capture occasions, and is regarded as a computationally [...]
Beyond mistakes: same-sex partner acceptance and broad mating filters coexist in termite pairing
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution
Same-sex sexual behavior is often interpreted either as a mistake arising from indiscriminate attempts or as an adaptive behavior directed towards same-sex partners. These explanations are typically considered mutually exclusive. Here we challenge this assumption using an adaptive same-sex pairing system in Reticulitermes termites. Long-term male-male pairings originate from tandem running, in [...]
Tree species richness and forest structure influence vertebrate scavenging
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Management
Tree species richness can alter forest structure and resource availability, often enhancing ecosystem functioning. However, biodiversity–ecosystem functioning research has largely focused on plant-mediated processes, leaving it unclear whether vertebrate-mediated functions such as carrion scavenging respond similarly to tree species richness. We investigated how tree species richness, canopy [...]
Droplet-induced surface aeration, not acoustic sensing, most parsimoniously explains accelerated germination of submerged rice seeds
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
When water drops strike the surface above submerged rice seeds, the seeds germinate faster, an effect that scales with drop height and falls off sharply with distance. Makris and Navarro1 attributed this to acoustic stimulation of statoliths, specialised gravity-sensing organelles, suggesting seeds can effectively sense the sound of raindrops. Here I argue that a simpler, well-established [...]