Preprints
There are 3224 Preprints listed.
Invasiveness reshapes the historical pattern of carp trait evolution
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Human-mediated invasions are increasingly recognised as contemporary ecological disturbances with profound impacts on microevolutionary processes. However, whether such impacts extend beyond microevolutionary change to alter long-term evolutionary trajectories across lineages remains poorly explored. Using a global phylogenetic analysis of nearly 1,400 carp species (freshwater fishes of the [...]
Identifying knowledge gaps on simultaneous above- and belowground organism responses to global change
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Global change affects all terrestrial organisms regardless if they live above or below the ground. Even though they are strongly linked by various direct and indirect interactions, organisms can respond very differently to global change stressors, due to different features of above- and belowground compartments. Many different organism groups have shown declines in diversity, abundance or biomass [...]
Multi-scale surveillance reveals substantial egg-laying winter activity in Aedes albopictus mosquito populations across temperate Europe
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
The Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), a competent vector for dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses, has expanded rapidly across temperate Europe. European vector surveillance typically operates May to October, assuming winter diapause precludes activity and transmission risk. However, recent field observations suggest sustained egg-laying winter activity in southern European populations, [...]
Assessing the sensitivity and robustness of the Living Planet Index through simulated population dynamics: strengths, stability, and challenges
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Understanding population change through time is crucial for effective conservation of biodiversity. The Living Planet Index (LPI) is a key indicator for tracking global species abundance trends under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, offering a picture of population change over time. However, the sensitivity of the index to zero values or to the number of missing values in time [...]
Exploring the legal, policy, ethical and practical implications of digitisation of botanical and fungal collections
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Collections-based institutions around the world hold an extraordinary wealth of information and knowledge through the specimens and associated information that they house.. In recent years, institutions holding botanical and fungal collections have invested significant energy and resources into the digitisation of these collections to make them more accessible and better connected. Digitisation [...]
Status of Large Carnivores and Wild Ungulates in North and South Balaghat Forest Divisions
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Balaghat forest circle, comprising the North and South Balaghat Forest Divisions in Madhya Pradesh, forms a vital component of the Central India Landscape. Strategically positioned between the Kanha and Pench Tiger Reserves, the region serves as a critical corridor for tiger (Panthera tigris) dispersal and long term genetic connectivity and therefore contributes significantly to the stability [...]
Pinpointing Fragility: Integrating Resilience Indicators into Risk Evaluation
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ecosystems globally are increasingly threatened by climate change and human pressures, yet current ecosystem risk assessments predominantly emphasize exposure to stressors while overlooking intrinsic ecosystem resilience—the capacity to absorb and recover from disturbances. Here, we advocate for an integrated framework that explicitly incorporates resilience into ecosystem risk assessments and [...]
The number and changing global distribution of seagrass-proximate people
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Human Geography, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation
Seagrass meadows are increasingly recognised as critical natural capital, yet global seagrass conservation still lacks a basic human geography. Building on examples from forests, here, we provide the first global estimate of seagrass-proximate people, defined as people living within specified distances of known seagrass. We combined a global distribution layer of known, mapped and observed [...]
Record of male Dugong (Dugong dugon, Müller, 1776) in East Halmahera North Maluku Indonesia
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Dugong (Dugong dugon Müller, 1776) of the Order Sirenia is the only species of marine mammal in the family Dugongidae that inhabits tropical and subtropical waters of the Indo-Pacific (Nishiwaki and Marsh, 1985). Due to its slow life history and threats to its population, this species is listed as "Vulnerable" (VU) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (Marsh and Sobtzick, [...]
The evolutionary link between food, condiments and medicine
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Anthropology, Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Food Science, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The deep relationship between humans and plants is of great interest to ethnobotanists, human ecologists, and evolutionary biologists. Humans have incorporated thousands of plant species into both traditional medicine and our diets, as foods and condiments. Many of these provide not only calories but also micronutrients and other bioactive compounds that contribute to health [1]. The boundaries [...]
Making survival spatial: an integrated model for territory occupancy and capture-recapture data
Published: 2026-05-05
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Knowledge about spatial variation in survival is central to understanding population dynamics and guiding conservation, yet assessing it is very hard. This limitation arises because capture-mark-recapture (CMR) data required for such inference must be collected over large spatial extents, which is logistically demanding and seldom possible. By contrast, territory occupancy (TO) data are typically [...]
Distinguishing Between Fertilisation Failure and Early Embryo Death in Failed Sea Turtle Eggs
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Does the substrate on which cryptogams grow matter for limno-terrestrial meiofauna?
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Cryptogam habitats support a wide range of limno-terrestrial meiofauna, but the factors that shape their communities are still not well understood. The physical substrate that cryptogams grow on (e.g., soil, the base of a tree, or its trunk) can influence local moisture, temperature, and nutrient conditions, yet its role in structuring meiofaunal assemblages has rarely been tested systematically. [...]
Sounding out the river: an end-to-end framework for monitoring bioacoustic events and sediment movement in freshwater soundscapes
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite rivers’ cornerstone place in global biodiversity and the key ecosystem services they provide to human societies, their soundscapes are severely understudied. Three challenges are in part responsible for this gap: the active nature of rivers complicates deployment logistics, their structural noise hinders the detection of significant events, and occuring sounds are largely [...]
Species Field Theory: Discovery of Latent Ecological Structure from Community Time Series
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Population Biology
Ecological abundance time series are shaped not only by interactions among species, but also by broader community-level dynamics such as hidden resources and shared ecological constraints. We introduce Species Field Theory (SFT), a field-based framework for discovering latent ecological structure from abundance time series. SFT recovered directed interactions in a six-species Lotka--Volterra [...]