Preprints
There are 2919 Preprints listed.
Environmental gradients shape community composition, energy pathways, and trophic dynamics in a coastal Arctic food web
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
A central question in ecology is how environmental heterogeneity structures community composition and trophic organization, and whether changes in physical conditions alter energy pathways without changing overall network connectivity. Arctic food webs have generally been quantified at broader spatial scales which must average spatial heterogeneity, limiting the ability to quantify asymmetric [...]
One Toolbox, Many Tools: A Practitioner’s Guide to Latent Variable Modelling for Community Ecology
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Multivariate Analysis, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
In this article, we present the case for Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models (GLLVMs) as a go-to choice of statistical method for any community ecologist wanting to tackle a range of present-day ecological research questions. GLLVMs bring tools and capabilities from classic (mixed-effects) regression models to multivariate community analysis, providing a number of novel ways to tailor [...]
Critical methodological flaws in Feurer et al. (2025) render its findings untrustworthy
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
A recent article by Feurer et al. (2025) aimed to synthesise literature on the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation globally. The stated aim of the review, to assess what are the proximate causes and underlying drivers of deforestation and forest degradation worldwide, is timely and relevant for ongoing policy efforts, for example zero-deforestation commitments and EU Deforestation [...]
Predicting demographic impacts from sublethal cumulative effects of offshore renewable developments on breeding seabirds
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology, Population Biology
1. Offshore renewable developments (ORDs) are often located in habitat used by protected seabird species and may cause sublethal effects by altering movement patterns and displacing individuals from key resources. Predicting how these effects translate into population-level impacts is challenging for long-lived species because demographic consequences emerge from complex, state-dependent [...]
Eelgrass-associated fishes show large interspecific differences in thermal acclimation to marine heatwaves
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Global warming is increasingly exposing shallow coastal habitats to thermal extremes, with important consequences for the fish species they support. Eelgrass (Zostera marina), the most widespread seagrass in the Northern Hemisphere, provides nursery habitats and foraging opportunities for a high diversity of temperate fishes. However, light limitation is compressing eelgrass depth distribution to [...]
Superorganismal Anisogamy: a Comparative Test of an Extended Theory
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Multicellular organisms and superorganisms (e.g., ant colonies) are both products of major evolutionary transitions in individuality, and they share many analogous traits. Theory developed to explain the evolution of one such trait, anisogamy, has recently been adapted to explain its superorganismal analogue: large egg-like queens and small sperm-like males. To test this theory with comparative [...]
First Report of Bilateral Gynandromorphism in the Australian Ant, Dolichoderus scrobiculatus (Mayr, 1876) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Gynandromorphism is a rare developmental phenomenon producing genetically chimeric individuals expressing both male and female phenotypes simultaneously. Here, I describe the morphological anomalies arising from a case of bilateral worker-male gynandromorphism in the Australian ant Dolichoderus scrobiculatus (Mayr, 1876), collected during a pitfall survey of native ant fauna. The specimen [...]
Closing the border on Australia’s domestic elephant ivory trade
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Law, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Australia’s domestic market for elephant (Elephantidae ssp.) ivory remains active online, despite long-standing international controls and pledges to close domestic trade. We conducted snapshot monitoring of surface-web vendors (online auction houses and webstores with ‘buy-it-now’ payment options) and a survey of Facebook Marketplace posts made between January and June 2025, sampled every two [...]
Age class and natal origin drive foraging patterns in a reintroduced Cinereous Vulture population
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ornithology
Widespread vulture population declines are often counteracted by conservation strategies including reintroduction programs and supplementary feeding schemes. However, the role of supplementary feeding – focusing on specific, predictable, feeding sites - on movement behaviour, has been little explored, especially within populations in which reintroduced and wild born birds of different age-classes [...]
A new analysis of biodiversity and conservation knowledge products to support environmental assessments
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sustainability
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) second global assessment of the state of biodiversity is in preparation, to be completed in 2028. To support this and other global and regional environmental assessments, we disaggregate three global knowledge products based on IUCN standards (the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Key Biodiversity [...]
Bridging general and targeted monitoring to reduce detectability bias in population indicators in the Common Quail
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Breeding Bird Monitoring Schemes (BMS), a cornerstone of large-scale volunteer-based ecological monitoring, are central to biodiversity assessment and conservation decision-making. However, their generalist design means that detectability can vary across species, habitats and behavioral states, introducing noise into abundance estimates and population indices. Improving how BMS account for [...]
General flowering in temperate forests arises from multi-timescale community synchrony
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Community-wide “general flowering” has been regarded as a tropical phenomenon. Here, we show that temperate forests also exhibit community-wide flowering at the regional scale. Annual seed-production records for seven dominant tree species across 432 forest sites, analysed with timescale-explicit wavelet metrics, reveal landscape-scale synchrony structured by two periods — a 2–4-year band and a [...]
Paronychia leucochthonicola (Caryophyllaceae: Paronychieae), a new species of the San Luis Valley, north-central New Mexico and adjacent Colorado.
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Botany
Paronychia leucochthonicola C.E.V.Alexander sp. nov. is described from two population complexes in the San Luis Valley, one along the Rio Grande Gorge west of Taos (New Mexico), the other centered on Flat Top in the San Luis Hills (Colorado). This is a rare species, occurring in narrow bands of habitat along rimrock. These plants have previously been identified as either Paronychia pulvinata or [...]
Spatial resolution and temperature matter for mapping Cerrado wetlands and dry grasslands
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Wetlands in the Brazilian Cerrado play key roles in regional carbon and water cycles but remain poorly mapped due to their patchy distribution and seasonal variability. Therefore, knowing where and when they occur is urgently needed. To address this gap, we evaluated how spatial resolution and inclusion of thermal (on top of traditional multispectral) data affected wetland vs. dry grassland [...]
The conditional ecology of pest suppression: A general mechanistic framework for predicting landscape effects on biological control
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Landscape heterogeneity often increases natural enemy abundance, yet its effects on crop pest suppression are strikingly inconsistent across empirical studies. We developed a trait-based simulation framework to identify the general mechanisms linking landscape structure to realized pest load. Across >150 in silico experiments, we show that landscape attributes influence biological control by [...]