Preprints
There are 2826 Preprints listed.
Overstating trophic cascade strength following large carnivore restoration in Yellowstone: A comment on Painter et al. (2025)
Published: 2025-12-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Painter et al. (2025) claim that large-carnivore recovery in Yellowstone National Park has produced a strong trophic cascade compared to other systems, citing a 152 fold increase in aspen sapling density and widespread recruitment of new trees. We show that these conclusions substantially overstate the cascade’s strength because of key methodological and interpretive flaws. First, Painter et al. [...]
Epidermal nanostructures enhance thermoregulation in alpine lizards by reducing near-infrared reflectance
Published: 2025-12-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ectothermic survival on the Tibetan Plateau, one of the most thermally challenging terrestrial environments, requires effective heat acquisition, yet the physiological and structural mechanisms enabling thermoregulation at high altitudes remain poorly resolved. Here, we demonstrated that high-altitude lizards warmed significantly faster than lowland relatives and showed reduced skin reflectance [...]
Engaging European Local Communities in Biodiversity Genomics Research: A Five-Step Framework for Scientists
Published: 2025-12-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Societally relevant applications of genomic science to understanding biodiversity depend on sustained and equitable engagement with Local Communities that supports ethical practice, builds a richer knowledge base, and guides sustainable conservation decisions. Pairing genomic sequencing data with long-held local ecological knowledge offers unique opportunities to gain insights into species [...]
The state of evidence on salmon farming: an umbrella review
Published: 2025-12-29
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences
Background: The global expansion of salmon aquaculture has transformed marine food systems, offering economic benefits while amplifying environmental and socio-economic challenges. The shift from wild-caught to farmed salmon has led to widespread concerns, including disease transmission, genetic introgression, pollution, and conflicts with Indigenous communities. Additionally, salmon feed supply [...]
From metrics to meaning: diversity as an essentially contested concept
Published: 2025-12-25
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences
Biodiversity is among ecology’s most widely invoked but least consistently defined concepts. Despite decades of theoretical and methodological developments, ecologists continue to disagree about what "diversity" measures and how it should be quantified. These disagreements have direct consequences to conservation science, policy making, and public engagement. We argue that this enduring debate is [...]
The Effect of Increased Nutrient Availability on Freshwater Phytoplankton Growth
Published: 2025-12-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
This study examines the impact of nutrient enrichment on phytoplankton biomass and water chemistry in pond water samples. Three concentrations of organic fish fertilizer (0 µL, 10 µL, and 20 µL per 10 mL of pond water) were tested over 18 days under constant illumination. Phytoplankton biomass was spectrophotometrically measured at 750 nm, with pH and turbidity also assessed to evaluate changes [...]
Dorsal Fin Edge Proportions and Their Relationship to Swimming Strategy in Sharks
Published: 2025-12-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Dorsal fins play a critical role in elasmobranch locomotion by providing stability, reducing roll, and enhancing swimming efficiency. Variation in dorsal fin geometry may therefore reflect ecological niche and swimming strategy. This study quantitatively compares dorsal fin leading-to-lagging edge ratios in three shark species with differing ecological roles: the spiny dogfish (Squalus [...]
Reframing Population Genetic Structure as a Quantum Optimization Problem
Published: 2025-12-24
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: 2025-12-24
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: 2025-12-24
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: 2025-12-24
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 [...]