Preprints
There are 3213 Preprints listed.
Distinguishing Between Fertilisation Failure and Early Embryo Death in Failed Sea Turtle Eggs
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Does the substrate on which cryptogams grow matter for limno-terrestrial meiofauna?
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Cryptogam habitats support a wide range of limno-terrestrial meiofauna, but the factors that shape their communities are still not well understood. The physical substrate that cryptogams grow on (e.g., soil, the base of a tree, or its trunk) can influence local moisture, temperature, and nutrient conditions, yet its role in structuring meiofaunal assemblages has rarely been tested systematically. [...]
Sounding out the river: an end-to-end framework for monitoring bioacoustic events and sediment movement in freshwater soundscapes
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite rivers’ cornerstone place in global biodiversity and the key ecosystem services they provide to human societies, their soundscapes are severely understudied. Three challenges are in part responsible for this gap: the active nature of rivers complicates deployment logistics, their structural noise hinders the detection of significant events, and occuring sounds are largely [...]
Species Field Theory: Discovery of Latent Ecological Structure from Community Time Series
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Population Biology
Ecological abundance time series are shaped not only by interactions among species, but also by broader community-level dynamics such as hidden resources and shared ecological constraints. We introduce Species Field Theory (SFT), a field-based framework for discovering latent ecological structure from abundance time series. SFT recovered directed interactions in a six-species Lotka--Volterra [...]
A Functionally Integrated Symbiotic System as a Mechanism for Angiosperm Diversification
Published: 2026-05-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Plant Sciences, Systems Biology
Flowering plants have maintained exceptionally high diversity for over 100 million years, yet the mechanisms enabling sustained macroevolutionary diversification remain unresolved. Classical theory predicts a trade-off between speciation and extinction, but angiosperms have repeatedly diversified while persisting across heterogeneous environments. Mutualistic interactions, pollination, seed [...]
Global patterns of vulnerability to wildlife exploitation in tropical birds and mammals
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Wildlife exploitation is one of the most pervasive anthropogenic pressures in tropical ecosystems and a major driver of vertebrate population declines, yet global assessments of species vulnerability to hunting remain spatially imprecise and methodologically inconsistent. We combine exposure to hunting with species-specific sensitivity and adaptive capacity to deliver a spatially explicit [...]
Resprouting responses to light environment and cutting season differ across resprouting stages and leaf habit in a heavy-snow Japanese beech forest.
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Resprouting is a key mechanism of recovery after aboveground damage and strongly influences forest regeneration and dynamics. This is also true in heavy-snow Japanese beech forests, where canopy-gap formation and snow pressure damage woody species. Understanding how light environment and disturbance season shape resprouting is therefore essential for interpreting life-history strategies and [...]
Sex differential effects of developmental heat stress on life-history and reproductive traits
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Global warming has led to increased mean global temperatures with projections suggesting continued warming throughout this century, posing an escalating threat to biological systems worldwide. Ectotherms are most vulnerable to this change as heat stress conditions can have severe implications on their development, mating interactions, and fitness. However, the sex-specific effects of [...]
Synthesis of Anthropogenic Impacts on Birds - Systematic Map and Bibliometric Analysis of Meta-Analyses
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Anthropogenic environmental change is a major driver of global bird declines, affecting species across continents, ecosystems, and life-history strategies. As such, it has drawn much attention in both primary research studies and meta-analyses. Because meta-analyses influence scientific consensus and conservation policy, it is essential to evaluate the representativeness and transparency of this [...]
When Policy Shapes Selection: Anticipating Evolutionary Feedbacks in Conservation
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Applied ecology and conservation increasingly operate in systems where ecological and evolutionary processes are tightly coupled and can unfold on management-relevant timescales, yet most policy still treats populations as evolutionarily static. As a result, interventions often generate unintended outcomes, from resistance evolution and harvest-induced trait shifts to hidden losses of adaptive [...]
The significance gap: statistical significance rates decrease from primary literature to effects used in ecological meta-analyses
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Warm Temperate Northwest Pacific
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Warm Temperate Northwest Pacific is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes intertidal forests and shrublands of the marine ecoregions of the East China Sea, that extend across China, Taiwan and South Korea. The Warm Temperate Northwest Pacific mangrove province mapped extent in 2023 was 6.83 km2, representing 0.0038% of the [...]
Extending {spatsoc} to measure intragroup social dynamics
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Software Engineering
Beyond proximity-based social networks and home range overlap, animal telemetry data can also be used to measure intragroup social dynamics including individual position within groups, individual and group level movement directions, leadership patterns and lagged follower behaviours. We used a scoping review of literature across domains, including behavioural ecology, collective movement, and [...]
Achieving Target 1 through effective spatial planning underpins the long-term success of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Global Biodiversity Framework
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
The first target of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) mandates signatory nations of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to address biodiversity loss across all regions within their national jurisdictions by 2030 by implementing Participatory, Integrated, and Biodiversity-Inclusive Spatial Planning (BISP). Delivering Target 1 through coordinated, inclusive [...]
Lead and slant on the geometry of coiling in gastropods
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Molluscan shells have been studied with various geometric models. Here I show that lead angle, the defining slope of a conical helix, emerges as a more useful parameter in morphometric analyses and (adaptationist) interpretation of covariation in coiling parameters. The widely used apical semiangle becomes redundant and uninformative, a passive consequence of taxon-specific lead angles and [...]