Preprints
There are 2819 Preprints listed.
Reframing Population Genetic Structure as a Quantum Optimization Problem
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Population genetic structure is commonly inferred using statistical and ordination-based methods that emphasize variance partitioning or likelihood-based clustering. While powerful, these approaches may undersample the full space of possible population partitions, particularly in systems characterized by weak genetic differentiation and high connectivity. Here, I present a proof-of-concept [...]
An analysis of passerine egg traits across the city mosaic: Urbanisation does not affect egg size and pigmentation patterns
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
1. Rapid urbanisation provides remarkable opportunities to study how sudden, extreme changes impact wildlife. Compared to natural areas, cities are characterised by factors affecting both abiotic (e.g. climate, pollution, habitat fragmentation) and biotic (e.g. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), species composition, phenology) components of the ecosystem, ultimately changing the [...]
Towards a quantitative view of the NLR gene family 4evolution in the genome space
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Plants and their pathogens coevolve over long time periods, and the history of coevolution is recorded in plant genes that confer pathogen resistance. Many of these code for Nucleotide-binding Leucine rich Repeat proteins (NLRs), which are crucial for distinguishing friends from foes and triggering potent defense responses. Advances in the ability to sequence genomes from many different species [...]
Coalitions matter for both men and women: Insights from three subsistence communities in southwest Ethiopia
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Coalitions are a widespread cooperative strategy across mammals, including humans, in which they form an important component that sustain friendships. In subsistence-based societies, research on coalitions has primarily focused on men, leaving women comparatively understudied. To address this gap, we examined coalitions within and between genders among three subsistence-based communities in [...]
Soil Effects on Vegetation Dynamics Under Climate Change
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
While predictive models of contemporary vegetation change often emphasize climate as the main driver, soil properties are increasingly recognized as critical mediators. This review synthesizes evidence on climate-soil interactions from diverse fields (e.g., paleobiology, species distribution modelling, and plant-soil feedbacks) across multiple scales. We propose a framework capturing how [...]
Data availability impacts the predictive accuracy of pressure-based biodiversity models
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Amidst the biodiversity crisis, there is high demand for spatially explicit biodiversity indicators. Global models that quantify impacts of human pressures provide important insights for conservation, but their accuracy in spatial projections has yet to be systematically tested. Here we evaluate this using a global dataset of 25,987 species inventories from 681 studies. We find that mixed models [...]
Community structure of macroinvertebrates in freshwater rock pools of the Brazilian semiarid region
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Freshwater rock pools (FRPs) are temporary aquatic environments that provide refuge for biodiversity in regions with low precipitation. The macroinvertebrate communities of FRPs in the Brazilian semi-arid region constitute an important link between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, given their dependency on both to complete their life cycles. The knowledge about FRPs and their resident biota [...]
Cryptic Degradation in Urban Forests: Decoupled Collapse of Soil Methane Sink and Understory Regeneration
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Urban forests are typically assessed by canopy metrics, assuming that tree persistence indicates ecosystem health. We present evidence of "cryptic degradation" (a functional decoupling between canopy biomass and belowground processes) using 25 years of data from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES). We document two concurrent phenomena: (1) a 59% reduction in soil methane (CH4) uptake beginning [...]
Interactive effects between drought and warming in field manipulative experiments across grasslands globally: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Published: 2025-12-22
Subjects: Biology
Aim Interactions between temperature and moisture are possible whereby increases in temperature can result in decreases in soil moisture, exacerbating drought conditions. Both uptake by and emission of carbon from grassland ecosystems are, in large part, governed by temperature and moisture. It is unclear how grasslands will respond to concurrent warming and drought conditions in the future [...]
Social structure in northern bottlenose whales: Stable relationships without stable groups
Published: 2025-12-22
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Uncovering the drivers and function(s) of social relationships across a wide range of species is key to understanding the ecology and evolution of social behaviour. Northern bottlenose whales have been identified as a particularly important case study for social evolution. Unlike other large, toothed whale species which live in kin-based social units, northern bottlenose whales appear to form [...]
Idiosyncrasies of Cistanthe ipniana Hershk. (C. sect. Rosulatae; Montiaceae)
Published: 2025-12-22
Subjects: Biodiversity
Cistanthe ipniana Hershk. [C. sect. Rosulatae (Reiche) Hershk.; Montiaceae] was described briefly based on collections from Huasco Province, Atacama Region, Chile. The species is distinctive in having flower morphology essentially identical to that of C. litoralis and C. longiscapa, to which it is very closely related genetically, but a distinctive vegetative form identical to that of C. [...]
Local data matters: Improving biodiversity risk and impact assessment through a data quality focus
Published: 2025-12-22
Subjects: Biodiversity
Widespread degradation of nature has increased pressure on corporations and financial institutions to assess and mitigate their biodiversity impact, however, collecting relevant local data can be costly. The increasing availability of biodiversity and Earth observation (EO) data suggest that impact can instead be assessed cost-effectively through extrapolation using existing data and [...]
The Singularity at the Heart of Evolutionary Biology: Organismal Selection and the Thermodynamic Origin of Life
Published: 2025-12-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The origin of the first organism presents as a fundamental discontinuity in evolutionary biology. While population‑centred theories of natural selection succeed when reproduction and heredity exist, they cannot explain life’s emergence from non‑living matter. Building on the conceptual framework of Organismal Selection, this work proposes a physical model in which the transition from lifeless [...]
A plain language review and guidance for modeling animal habitat-selection
Published: 2025-12-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Animal habitat selection is the process of how individual organisms disproportionately use habitat compared to what is available to them. Understanding habitat selection is important for the study of ecology and conservation. However, learning the foundations of making inference or prediction on animal habitat selection can be quite challenging. Foremost, the literature is large and highly [...]
Escaping the net: Assessing midwater gear selectivity for the Joint United States and Canada Integrated Ecosystem and Pacific hake (Merluccius productus) Acoustic-Trawl survey
Published: 2025-12-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Acoustic-trawl surveys use trawl catches to validate the species and size composition of fish aggregations detected acoustically. However, certain sizes of fish may be more likely to escape some trawls, which can bias the size and age distribution of the catch used to estimate biomass. To quantify size-selectivity, we studied 3 midwater trawls used for the United States and Canada joint survey of [...]