Preprints
There are 3785 Preprints listed.
Halophyte-associated salt-tolerant rhizobacteria: ecological adaptation, mechanistic pathways, and translational relevance for wheat salinity tolerance
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Background Soil salinization is an expanding constraint to agricultural productivity worldwide, particularly in irrigated and arid regions and strongly limits wheat growth and yield. Although breeding and biotechnology have produced cultivars with improved ion-exclusion and tissue-level tolerance, these advances alone do not fully mitigate salinity-induced disruptions in rhizosphere processes and [...]
Changepoint detection methods as a practical tool for assessment of ecological restoration
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Statistics and Probability
1. A key aim of many conservation initiatives is to induce a change, however detecting change from monitoring data can be challenging. Here, we introduce statistical methods for changepoint detection, demonstrating how this under-utilised analytical approach can provide practitioners and researchers insight and help in planning ecological restoration projects. 2. We show why it is important to [...]
Parasitism of an intertidal foundation species: Allometric scaling and environmental constraints on trematode distribution in barnacles across biological scales
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Parasites of foundation species, such as fucoids, mussels, and barnacles, can shape the intertidal communities that depend on them, yet their effects remain poorly understood. On rocky shores of the Northeast Pacific, the acorn barnacle Balanus glandula forms dense aggregations that provide habitat for other species. We investigated infection by the microphallid trematode Maritrema gratiosum in [...]
The Ecological Price of Segregation: Socioeconomic Stratification Structures Urban Bird and Vegetation Distribution
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
As income inequality rises, cities do not merely become less equal in aggregate; they also sort residents into increasingly separate neighborhoods, a spatial process known as socioeconomic segregation. Building on a companion study that documented the luxury effect in Bogotá using cadastral land value (Mutis & Armenteras, 2026), this analysis asks a distinct question: does the city's [...]
Feedbacks between human behavior, disease transmission, and vector ecology generate culture-linked dynamics in vector-borne diseases
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Epidemiology, Population Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Vector-borne diseases cause millions of deaths worldwide and are expanding into new regions and populations as climate change intensifies. Human behavior, shaped by social and cultural factors, is central to disease control, yet feedbacks among behavior, disease transmission, and vector ecology remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we develop a parsimonious malaria model coupling [...]
Understanding the Global Report on Collective Progress in the Implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: Purpose, Content, and Science-Policy Engagement
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), establishes four long-term 2050 goals, 23 action-oriented 2030 targets, and a standardized monitoring framework to track collective progress. The 2026 global review marks the first operational test of the Party-led planning, monitoring, reporting, and review (PMRR) mechanism, [...]
Wildlife crime moves in spatial pulses
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Geography
The geography of crime is often treated as a static backdrop to criminal activity, yet where crime occurs may change as a crime unfolds. We show that wildlife crime has a dynamic geography that expands, contracts, and becomes anchored in persistent places. Combining crime scripting with participatory mapping, we examined pangolin hunting and scale trade across Cameroon and Gabon and found that [...]
Uneven evidence for a shared planet, sampling and publication are coupled worldwide
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Communication, International and Intercultural Communication, Publishing
Natural archives record environmental change over timescales that instrumental series cannot reach, and global environmental assessments rest on the evidence they supply. To our knowledge, however, where that evidence is produced, and whether it reflects the processes it describes, has not been established. Here we reconstruct the sampling and publication geography of 33,145 studies of past [...]
Frequent recovery of Sydowia polyspora from brown spot needle blight-associated loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) needles in Alabama
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Plant Pathology
Sydowia polyspora is a widespread conifer-associated fungus that can function as an endophyte, saprophyte, or opportunistic pathogen, but its occurrence in southeastern pine systems remains poorly characterized. During surveys of symptomatic loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) in Washington and Cullman counties, Alabama, fungal isolates morphologically consistent with Sydowia spp. were recovered from [...]
Estimated Time to Act: A Global Assessment of Biodiversity Exposure to Human Modification
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Spatial Science
Biodiversity loss is accelerating under compounding human pressures, yet most conservation tools quantify the pressure species already face, rather than when it will push them beyond the levels they have experienced. This temporal blind spot limits proactive planning, particularly under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which sets action-oriented targets for 2030 and [...]
Interactive effects of land use change and climate drive the decline of a threatened boreal forest orchid in Finland
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Land use and climate change are two of the greatest threats to biodiversity globally. However, their interactive effects remain poorly understood. In the boreal forest biome, where species are experiencing increasing pressures from forest management and climate change, improved understanding of these effects is urgently needed. Here, we assess the impacts of forest loss and both baseline and [...]
Genomic variation in Sydowia polyspora in relation to geography and host symptom severity
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Pathology
Background. Sydowia polyspora is a widespread conifer-associated fungus with ecological roles that vary among host and disease contexts. However, how its genomic variation corresponds to geography and host symptom severity remains poorly understood. We examined whether genomic differentiation among S. polyspora isolates recovered from symptomatic Pinus taeda varied between geographic regions and [...]
Selection Effects Associated with Leaf Area and Stomatal Density Drive Productivity of Young Temperate Tree Communities Under Different Water Exclusion Treatments
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. A positive relationship between species richness and productivity has been observed in forests around the world. The two classes of mechanisms thought to underlie this relationship, complementarity effects and selection effects, both rely on species’ traits, whereby the diversity of traits (under complementarity effects) or the presence of specific trait values (under selection effects) can [...]
Occurrence records recover moth flight timing but compress interannual phenological variation
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phenological shifts are important indicators of climate-change responses, but large-scale inference requires coverage that structured monitoring rarely provides. Occurrence databases such as GBIF offer an alternative, although the reliability of different phenological metrics remains uncertain. I compared five metrics (Q10, Q50 and Q90 timing quantiles, weighted mean flight date and season width) [...]
What is Social Behavior? Clarifying and Integrating the Concept for Cross-species Research
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences