Preprints
There are 3005 Preprints listed.
Abiotic constraints and recreational rock climbing shape cliff vegetation in Freyr, Belgium
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aim: Cliff ecosystems support diverse vascular plant communities due to high abiotic heterogeneity and their historical role as climatic refugia. However, cliffs are increasingly exposed to disturbances from recreational rock climbing. The ecological effects of climbing likely depend on abiotic cliff characteristics—such as slope, aspect, and microtopography—but these context-dependent [...]
Call for a paradigm shift from statistical causal inference to multi-evidence causal investigation
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Explicit discussions of causal methods have long fallen into the domain of statistics. Scientists have instead pursued mechanistic knowledge as an alternative approach to causal understanding. In the past two decades, a body of literature has developed that constitutes a statistical causal inference paradigm based on restrictive assumptions that fail to respect mechanistic knowledge. Recent [...]
Seven principles for engaging schools with nature: pooling the expertise of teachers and nature educators
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Education, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations
Nature connection in schools can address several issues faced in both environmental and educational fields. However, guidance is limited and many aspects can feel daunting or risky for schools under multiple other constraints. As a group of researchers, schoolteachers, and nature educators, we have co-produced seven guiding principles for integrating nature within UK schooling, particularly in [...]
Island species as models for small population biology and conservation
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Islands provide unparalleled natural laboratories for understanding how small, isolated populations persist and evolve. Our synthesis of island population studies reveals that 50–70% report effective population sizes below 100, yet many taxa have sustained such small populations for millions of years. Strikingly, only 4% and 27% of studies examined genetic load and genomic diversity, exposing [...]
Towards ecologically meaningful foundation models
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ecology aims to explain and predict how organisms interact with each other and their environments across space and time. Yet both ecological data and theory are fragmented, leading to models that generalise poorly beyond specific systems or scales. Empirical evidence spans diverse modalities, resolutions and contexts, while theory is distributed across partially overlapping frameworks that are [...]
Thermal filtering reveals a cryptic reservoir of thermotolerant yeasts in Sub-Antarctic soils
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Global climate change is accelerating ecological transformation in Sub-Antarctic ecosystems, where resident biota exhibit narrow thermal tolerances. While microbial responses to warming are increasingly documented, the role of soil yeasts, key players in organic matter decomposition, remains poorly understood. Here, we show that warming acts as a deterministic filter, triggering a profound [...]
Disease-associated aggregation of Dactylopleustes yoshimurai on sea urchins: host-level and lesion-level processes
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Marine Biology
Amphipods of the genus Dactylopleustes are specialized symbionts of sea urchins, and in some species aggregations on host lesions have been reported; however, the behavioural mechanisms underlying such lesion-associated aggregation remain poorly understood. We investigated host-level and within-host processes underlying lesion aggregation in the symbiotic amphipod Dactylopleustes yoshimurai on [...]
Between Interface and Truth: Multi-Task Selection Drives Ecologically Veridical Perception
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Biostatistics, Cognitive Neuroscience, Evolution
When does optimisation for performance yield representations that track world structure? We develop a mathematical theory of agents with a single fixed encoding shared across tasks, and use it to resolve the broader debate over whether selection favors fitness-tuned interfaces or veridical perception. Selection favors ecological veridicality: preserving exactly those world-state distinctions [...]
Meta-analysis showing that immunisation is an effective method to reduce amphibian susceptibility to the chytrid fungus
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Emerging infectious diseases are increasingly causing mortality in vertebrates, driving widespread population declines in some species. Amphibian chytridiomycosis is a lethal fungal disease that has caused population collapses and extinctions worldwide. Identifying approaches that can effectively enhance host survival is therefore an urgent conservation priority. Here, we investigate whether [...]
High-resolution modelling of biodiversity under the shared socio-economic scenarios
Published: 2026-03-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Impacts on biodiversity from global climate and land use change manifest through changes in habitat availability and suitability for species. We currently lack fine grain predictions about how species and their habitats respond at the local level to global drivers of change, particularly under future scenarios of coupled climate and land use change. Policies for biodiversity management often [...]
Measuring biodiversity impact, change and restoration opportunity for business
Published: 2026-03-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Most pressures that cause biodiversity loss are driven by economic activity. There is significant interest from the private sector in understanding impacts and dependencies of business activity on biodiversity. However, measuring the impacts of direct and indirect business activities on biodiversity, including species, at multiple scales remains a considerable challenge. There are no currently [...]
Addressing Unobserved Covariates in Species Distribution Models: Impacts on Inference and Mitigation via Joint Species Distribution Models
Published: 2026-03-04
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used in ecology to assess the distribution of species populations across space and time. Correlative SDMs, in particular, are used to infer relationships between species records and environmental variables. A classical approach for implementing this type of SDMs is to employ generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) as a parametric regression method. [...]
Do harbour porpoise mortality records reflect living population structure? A matrix population model diagnostic
Published: 2026-03-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Effective conservation of marine mammals depends on reliable demographic information, yet acquiring such data for highly mobile cetaceans is challenging. Harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) are widely used as sentinel species, but much of what is known about their demography comes from opportunistic sources, such as stranding and bycatch records. While invaluable, these data may be subject to [...]
Reflective Interdisciplinarity in Practice: Integrating Biology and Philosophy in Studies of Individualization
Published: 2026-02-28
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences
Interdisciplinary research is widely acknowledged as a valuable means of knowledge production and as crucial for addressing complex scientific and societal problems. Interdisciplinary research takes many forms, and this article offers a novel case study of a distinctive form of interdisciplinarity, reflective interdisciplinarity. The article analyzes interdisciplinary research undertaken by [...]
Old habits die hard: pigeons maintain route fidelity but reduce flight altitude when exposed to a raptor-like robot
Published: 2026-02-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Prey organisms employ a range of adaptive strategies to mitigate predation risk, including camouflage, active predator deterrence by collective anti-predator behaviours, specialized predator evasion tactics, and spatial or temporal avoidance of predators. The latter may involve memorizing locations of non-lethal predator encounters and altering movement routines to subsequently avoid areas where [...]