Preprints
There are 3315 Preprints listed.
Problems of geometry, sampling, and scale in gridded biodiversity data, and proposed solutions
Published: 2026-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Grids, and gridded biodiversity data such as regional or country-level atlases, play a prominent role in ecology, particularly in the study of spatial patterns of species occupancy, geographic ranges, biodiversity, and their drivers and temporal dynamics. However, managing, exploring, and analyzing data in grids comes with problems. Here, we review the problems with gridded data, and the existing [...]
Two centuries of decline and partial recovery of fish in rivers of post-industrial northeast England: lessons for global rivers in the Anthropocene
Published: 2026-06-03
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Understanding the historical decline in ecological condition of rivers, their fish stocks, and of their restoration, offers one perspective by which contemporary threats to river fishes in less developed regions may be assessed. We explore the decline and recovery of fish populations in rivers (Tyne, Wear, Tees) of post-industrial northeast England. Before ~1850, Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and [...]
Computable Nature Dependency in a Watershed Knowledge Graph
Published: 2026-06-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Systems Biology
Resolving nature-related financial risk and watershed resilience requires a representational shift from opaque, aggregate indices to auditable, mechanistic pathways. Current natural-capital workflows often succumb to an "epistemic collapse", where granular ecological interactions are erased in favor of sector-level proxies or spatial heatmaps that lack a downstream asset trace. Here, we present a [...]
Predicting substrate size at a watershed scale to inform conservation planning for a declining salmonid species
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Biology, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Good quality spawning habitat is critical for fish embryo development, survival, and overall population productivity. Appropriate riverbed substrate size is particularly important for riverine-spawning salmonids but the availability of suitable substrate may vary across a watershed. Predicting substrate size at watershed extents may therefore be critical to inform management and conservation of [...]
From social experience to social behaviour: hormonal and behavioural phenotypes during adolescence in male guinea pigs
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Adolescence is the transition from juvenility to adulthood and is characterized by prominent endocrine, neural and behavioural alterations. Thus, adolescence represents a sensitive phase during which social experiences can shape endocrine and behavioural phenotypes. Although the influence of the social environment during adolescence has been widely investigated, most studies assessed such effects [...]
Between categories and continua: growth-form organization in global leaf economics spectrum space
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The leaf economics spectrum (LES) describes a globally coordinated trade-off between acquisitive and conservative plant resource-use strategies, yet how major plant growth forms are organized within multidimensional LES space and the extent to which these patterns reflect evolutionary history remain incompletely resolved. Using species-level trait data from the TRY Plant Trait Database, we [...]
Motivations and organizational models for private sector biodiversity engagement
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Private sector engagement is increasingly recognized as critical for addressing global biodiversity loss, yet the recent IPBES global assessment of business and biodiversity confirms that current economic conditions remain largely incompatible with the transformative change required. We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with business leaders and sustainability practitioners across multiple [...]
Gradual development and chance beget individuality
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
Behaviors – and thus behavioral individuality – rarely emerge fully formed but are instead built gradually through development, shaped by processes involving learning, skill formation, and experience. Prevailing theory in behavioral ecology, however, has largely focused on static equilibrium outcomes where behaviors are analyzed only as fully formed traits, often neglecting development. Here, we [...]
Concise guidelines and complementary checklists for improving research reliability and reproducibility
Published: 2026-06-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Checklists to address reproducibility shortfalls have proliferated but tend to be discipline- or research stage-specific and lack context or learning opportunities. We offer an alternative: one page, every stage, with a reason for each recommendation.
Evaluating the potential of molecular dietary analysis of predators for the detection of emerging plant pests
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Agriculture, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biosecurity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Genetics, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Monitoring plant pests is crucial for maximising yields across agricultural and forest production systems, but also for the mitigation of invasive species spread. Traditional monitoring methods, such as mass trapping and direct observation, scale poorly and introduce latency between collection, detection and response. Since many plant pests are frequently consumed by predators, molecular dietary [...]
Cryptic diversity constrains biogeographical inference in microscopic animals: evidence from bdelloid rotifers in Greenland
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Species are fundamental units of biodiversity, yet their delimitation remains challenging in many organismal groups. The increasing use of DNA data has revealed widespread cryptic diversity, in which genetically distinct lineages are morphologically indistinguishable. Consequently, many morphology-based biogeographical inferences have likely overestimated species ranges, particularly in [...]
The Mother’s Dilemma: Ancient maternal trade-offs explain egalitarian moral cooperation.
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Biological and Physical Anthropology
The emergence of egalitarian moral norms is widely regarded as a crucial transition in human social evolution, yet it remains a puzzle. Existing explanatory models leave several issues unresolved and share a common reliance on male social agency and alliance-making, which predisposes them towards mechanisms based in social competition. By contrast, drawing on comparative panin socioecology, this [...]
Deterministic by design: causal inference challenges for ‘biodiversity change’ syntheses
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Understanding biodiversity change over space and time is a central goal of ecology. A common approach to asking why biodiversity is changing over time, is to collate biodiversity time series from multiple sites and undertake a two-step analysis: First, site-level estimates of ‘biodiversity change’ are calculated. Second, those change estimates are regressed on putative environmental drivers, such [...]
A simple demographic explanation for the evolution of the dietary restriction response and its ecological relevance
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Considerable life history plasticity is observed in response to variation in food availability and composition. This is perhaps best known in the context of dietary restriction, which consistently induces lower reproduction and higher survival across taxa, with nutritional geometry studies further demonstrating the importance of food composition as well as amount. Although there is a huge amount [...]
The coevolution of cooperation and socially-mediated dispersal: a model
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Population Biology
Limited dispersal can promote the evolution of cooperation by increasing relatedness between social partners. However it also intensifies kin competition, potentially cancelling the benefits of helping. Here, we analyse a model in which individuals evolve both (i) the probability of cooperating within social groups as adults, and (ii) the dispersal probability of juveniles conditional on the [...]