Preprints
There are 3743 Preprints listed.
Expanded Polystyrene Exposure and Nitrite-Related Absorbance in Eisenia fetida
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Microplastic contamination can affect soil properties, microbial communities, and nutrient cycling. This study evaluated whether expanded polystyrene (EPS) microplastic exposure during vermicomposting affected nitrite-related absorbance in vermicast produced by Eisenia fetida. Fifty independent experimental units were divided into a control treatment without EPS (n = 25) and an EPS treatment (n = [...]
A finite-population bound on the selection limit
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fisher’s fundamental theorem is an identity. Given current gene frequencies, the partial change in mean fitness, holding genotypic fitnesses at their additive predictions, equals the additive genetic variance in fitness divided by mean fitness. Price gave that reading and Ewens proved the discrete-generation form. Lessard and Grafen have argued over what the partial change represents. Akin and [...]
Plasticity Decay and Attenuated Recovery (PDAR): A Hybrid Dynamical Model for the Historical Accessibility of Evolutionary Space
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The evolutionary history of life is marked by a pronounced temporal asymmetry: an early, disproportionate generation of major morphological novelty, followed by extensive taxonomic diversification that does not appear to be accompanied by comparable expansion of morphological disparity. This paper develops a minimal hybrid dynamical model, termed Plasticity Decay and Attenuated Recovery (PDAR), [...]
Land-cover-specific network reconfiguration and spatial trajectories govern abrupt vegetation regime shifts across global drylands
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
In drylands, abrupt vegetation changes may signal declining resilience and regime shifts, yet global assessments have largely focused on greenness trends while overlooking the role of spatial organization. Here we analyzed 15,898 1-km² landscape units across global drylands (aridity index < 0.65) using 30-m land cover and NDVI time series. We quantified multidimensional spatial structure via [...]
Weak and species-specific morphological change in Atlantic Forest birds across two decades of warming
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Birds are widely expected to shrink as the climate warms, but few tropical studies span decades. In the central Amazon, mean body mass fell in all 77 species studied and a third of species lengthened their wings. We analysed 24 years (1995–2018) of morphology from 73 passerine species (12,571 live-capture records; ATLANTIC BIRD TRAITS) across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, a region that warmed by [...]
Climate vulnerability assessment framework choice influences species prioritization and prediction of population decline
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Climate change vulnerability assessments (CCVAs) are regarded as an essential strategy to conservation strategies but are rarely used to inform conservation planning and prioritize species for management and adaptation. The main factor inhibiting its use is the challenge of combining exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive-capacity variables and, especially, of evaluating the ability of frameworks to [...]
What, if anything, can studies of adaptation to altitude reveal about responses to climate change?
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding the impacts of global climate change on biodiversity is critical to its conservation. Existing frameworks within evolutionary biology can help us predict whether, and under what conditions, adaptation may be a sufficient means for population persistance in a changing environment. Here, we consider the relevance of mountain ranges as natural systems for studying this process. [...]
Diurnal temperature fluctuations outweigh population origin in shaping thermal performance and range predictions in European Aedes albopictus
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Predicting invasive ectotherm responses to climate change requires understanding how population-level variation and diurnal temperature fluctuations shape thermal performance, and whether constant-temperature measurements accurately capture performance under fluctuating conditions. Yet many models, including those used to predict mosquito distribution and disease transmission, still rely on [...]
Probabilistic projections of human modification of the terrestrial biosphere from 2020 to 2040
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Conservation actions are more effective when they anticipate future threats rather than respond only after loss occurs. Most spatial forecasts focus only on land-cover change and fail to capture the broader set of pressures that degrade biodiversity. To close this gap, we develop global probabilistic forecasts of cumulative human modification (HM), a continuous measure that combines 16 [...]
Genomic repetition in climate adaptation across different crop species
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Commercial crop varieties (cultivars) have a narrow genetic diversity that makes them vulnerable to climate change. Yet most crops have related semi-domesticated varieties (landraces) and wild relatives that thrive under climates that would be considered extreme for cultivars. The genomes of such varieties are reservoirs of unknown adaptive traits, some of which could be used to extend the [...]
Nonlinear survey-effort adjustment removes the reported bird-diversity effect
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A recent study published in Science reported that greater photovoltaic policy stringency (PSI) was associated with lower Shannon diversity, lower Simpson diversity, lower species richness, and slightly higher species evenness in China. We exactly reproduced their published model and then evaluated seven alternative survey-effort specifications across Richness, Shannon diversity, Simpson [...]
Amplexus Takeover in the Asian Common Toad, Duttaphrynus melanostictus, in Dumka, Jharkhand, India
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
I report an instance of amplexus takeover in the Asian Common Toad, Duttaphrynus melanostictus, observed at Simardhuma village, Dumka District, Jharkhand, India, on 21 July 2025. Over an 18-minute sequence, a second male repeatedly interfered with an amplectant pair until the amplectant male released the female, after which the second male assumed amplexus. Although male replacement is known [...]
Expert Elicitation on demographic consequences of seabird compensatory measures
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Protected seabirds present a serious constraint to offshore renewable energy expansion due to potential effects of displacement from habitat, barrier effects to movements, and collisions with turbine blades. The process of delivering compensatory measures to offset offshore wind (OW) impacts on seabirds is underway as deployments increase in scale and pace, driving cumulative impacts to become [...]
Large differences in thermal tolerance between isolated organs in rainbow trout
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Due to climate change, research on thermal performance limits in ectotherms has received much attention in the last two decades. However, the underlying physiological mechanisms and most vulnerable organs remain largely unknown. Here, we examined contractile performance in different organs from rainbow trout during an acute warming challenge, including the heart (cardiac muscle), caudal peduncle [...]
From training to implementation: building capacity in invasion science
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Effective management of biological invasions requires scientifically robust decision-support tools and the capacity to apply them consistently. Risk identification is the first step of invasion risk analysis, yet comparatively little attention has been given to how such tools are transferred into operational use. This paper describes an international training programme based on the Invasiveness [...]