Preprints
There are 3180 Preprints listed.
Wolf – human interactions in a shared landscape: spatio-temporal distribution and visitors' perception in The Hoge Veluwe National Park
Published: 2026-04-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Large carnivores are increasingly recolonizing human-dominated landscapes, yet the mechanisms enabling their persistence in intensively used landscapes and how this shapes risk perception and tolerance remain insufficiently understood. In particular, few studies have integrated fine-scale ecological data with on-site assessments of visitor perceptions from the same recreational area. Using the [...]
Status and conservation assessment of southern marginal populations of the Golden Eagle Aquila chrysaetos under IUCN criteria
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) is one of the most widely distributed raptors worldwide and is currently classified as Least Concern at the global scale. However, global assessments may obscure pronounced regional asymmetries in population status and extinction risk, particularly at the geographical margins of a species’ range. At the southern edge of its distribution, encompassing the [...]
Plasmidomics: studying plasmids as ecological entities beyond their hosts
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Bacteriology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences
Plasmids are autonomous mobile genetic elements whose ecology extends beyond individual bacterial hosts. As molecular symbionts, they traverse strains, species, and environments, disseminating adaptive genes and shaping microbial community structure through dynamics that are often decoupled from host taxonomy. Plasmidomics—the omics discipline dedicated to the study of plasmids—has revealed that [...]
Expanding the uptake of conservation technology: insights from efforts to share conservation bioacoustics capacity in Indonesia and Malaysia
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) of terrestrial habitats has grown exponentially over the last three decades, given recent technological advances and the utility of this approach in providing information on acoustically active animals, their habitats, and human activities across large spatial and temporal scales. Yet, just 1% of PAM studies were conducted in Southeast Asia, despite the region’s [...]
What do ecology and evolutionary biology journal websites communicate about their policies and preferences regarding replication studies?
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The replication of prior research is a cornerstone of the scientific process and valued as such in ecology and evolutionary biology. However, it appears replication studies are nowhere near as prevalent in the published literature as might be expected if they were a routine part of building confidence in research findings. This may be due in part to the widespread perception of replication [...]
The human handprint in shaping plant diversity in urban environments
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Urban plant assemblages comprise mixtures of native and non-native species distributed across a variety of urban green space (UGS) types, yet we lack an integrated understanding of how plant diversity and composition varies across UGS that differ in the degree to which communities arise through self-assembly versus human facilitation. Here, we address the gap based on a comprehensive dataset of [...]
Dwarf males function as males but retain female-biased transcriptional profiles in an androdioecious barnacle
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences
Sexual systems exhibit remarkable diversity, yet how alternative reproductive strategies are implemented at the level of gene expression remains poorly understood. In androdioecious species, males coexist with hermaphrodites and function exclusively as sperm donors, raising the question of whether the males’ transcriptional profiles are fully masculinized or retain features of hermaphroditic [...]
Molecular War and Peace: the Concurrent Path to Antibiosis and Antibiotic Resistance
Published: 2026-04-23
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
The possibility of the emergence of proto-antibiotic and proto-resistance molecules in the prebiotic world, as primary elements involved in “molecular wars,” is examined in this conceptual review. Throughout the Earth's early history, prebiotic chemical processes produced molecules that associated both randomly and persistently. Over time, those configurations that achieved greater stability were [...]
Novel citation-based indices exacerbate privilege gaps in academic publishing
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Scholarly Publishing
An undeniable fact of modern academia is that it is metric-driven, a landscape in which researchers are narrowly defined by their publication output and citations. The demand for simple methods for defining our output has led to many popular citation-based metrics, used as shorthand for academic output both at higher levels of funding and day-to-day assessments. Despite the flaws being [...]
MASTHING: a process-based model of mast seeding in European beech
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Physiology, Plant Sciences
Masting, the synchronised interannual variation in seed production, shapes forest regeneration and many ecosystem processes, yet process-based models remain underdeveloped. Here we introduce MASTHING (MASting THeory modellING), an individual-tree model coupling phenology, carbon gain, resource storage, temperature cues, and environmental vetoes on reproduction. We parameterised MASTHING for [...]
Beyond where species go: integrating SDMs, functional traits, and the Tree of Life to anticipate climate‑driven change in ecosystem functioning
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Forecasting biodiversity under climate-change scenarios typically involves applying species distribution models (SDMs) to project shifts in the areas where abiotic conditions are suitable for a given species under future climates, often interpreted as gains or losses in species ranges. Although the impacts of species loss are often quantified using measures of functional or evolutionary [...]
Methodological challenges in avian nestbox temperature manipulation experiments: a review with recommendations
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Experimental manipulation of nest temperature - particularly in nest boxes, given ease of access and control - has become increasingly used for understanding the ecological impacts of climate change on wild birds. While field experiments are crucial for establishing causal links between temperature variation and biological responses, they present numerous logistical challenges. Moreover, [...]
The promise and challenge of environmental epigenomics in a rapidly changing world
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Environmental Studies, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
There has been a fast-paced research effort on the role of epigenetic mechanisms in facilitating organisms’ capacity to cope with rapid environmental change, highlighted by several recent reviews and special issues on this topic. What is important, along with this momentum, is to pause and reflect on both the promises and challenges of linking detailed molecular mechanisms to broad patterns of [...]
Reliable inference: benefits of open raw data may be universal in meta-analysis
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
While the benefits of open data are often discussed, they are rarely quantified. Here, we provide the first evidence of the potential gains from using raw data for evidence synthesis and introduce a tool that helps researchers determine when this approach is most beneficial. Classical meta-analysis (CMA) relies on published results, making it vulnerable to publication bias and p-hacking. We [...]
TOCing with birds: Touchscreen-equipped operant chambers as flexible tools for avian behavioral experiments
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Understanding how animals respond to visual stimuli is a key goal of behavioral and evolutionary ecology. Experiments documenting the behavioral responses of receivers to different stimuli are an essential explanatory tool, yet presenting stimuli that engage in complex but controlled animal behaviors – such as naturalistic movement – to biologically relevant receivers remains a significant [...]