Preprints
There are 3260 Preprints listed.
A financial framework for nature must that recognise that ecosystems have local temporal and spatial dynamics
Published: 2026-05-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Business
Decades of research and politics have led to a coherent set of biodiversity metrics and strong evidence that biodiversity supports human well-being. So why do we not have a financial system that encourages conservation and restoration of nature? We argue that a central reason is that the financing used has not been aligned with the spatial and temporal structure of biodiversity. Ecosystems are [...]
Colossal Disinformation
Published: 2026-05-20
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
I have a position: de-extinction is almost impossible, however, deëxtinction, a word invented by the world’s first “de-extinction” company Colossal Laboratories & Bioscience’s can be (Max 2025); hereafter Colossal, which they define as the creation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that appear and act like extinct species, is possible. It’s branding, not science. I and other critics of [...]
The roles of density dependence, developmental asynchrony, and niche traversal costs in shaping the evolution of ontogenetic complexity
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Most organisms undergo some degree of niche transition throughout their life cycles, which are typically accompanied by morphological, physiological, and/or behavioral changes. Ontogenetic complexity generally refers to the magnitude and abruptness of these changes. Evolutionary theory has described how various genetic properties facilitate and constrain the evolution of ontogenetic complexity, [...]
A Protocol for Standardizing Measurements and Enabling Global Harmonization of Herbarium Leaf Reflectance Spectra
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Reflectance spectroscopy offers a powerful approach to integrate high-throughput phenotypic data from herbarium specimens into the digital landscapes of ecology, evolution, and systematics. Because inconsistencies in instrumentation and measurement practices can increase noise and limit dataset compatibility, the International Herbarium Spectral Digitization Working Group (IHerbSpec) has [...]
Cheating and imperfect vaccines as drivers of bacterial evolution
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Cheating is an ubiquitous evolutionary strategy, appearing everywhere throughout the tree of life. Among bacteria, cheating appears mostly through the consumption of public good without participation in their production. Some vaccines, because they specifically target these public goods, may alter the eco-evolutionary dynamics of cheating in bacterial populations of pathogenic species such as [...]
Oak masting remains stable despite climate warming
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Climate warming alters tree reproduction, but long-term tests of how it affects the large, synchronised interannual fluctuations in seed production known as masting remain rare. Theory predicts that climate-driven declines in masting should be most likely when species combine high reproductive sensitivity to weather cues with rapid climatic change during the corresponding cue windows. We tested [...]
Parasites and forage as determinants of body condition and population size in an imperiled ungulate.
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Parasitology, Population Biology
Rapid environmental changes are resulting in widespread changes in population size, health, and physiology of wildlife, especially at northern latitudes where the impacts of climate change are more pronounced. Barren-ground caribou (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus) have declined across much of their range in recent decades, and while the ultimate causes are unknown, western science and local [...]
Quantitative Metabarcoding for Invertebrate Pest Monitoring and Management
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Agriculture, Entomology, Molecular Genetics
Invertebrate pests are one of the most significant threats to global agriculture. To monitor these pests, invertebrate trapping methods are commonly used to collect a representation of the diversity of pest species present in the ecosystem. Assessing and monitoring such diversity is key to inform pest management strategies, but due to the complexity of bulk trap samples from non-selective [...]
Designing for nature doesn't cost the Earth
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Urban Studies and Planning
1. A key barrier to the development of nature positive cities is the unknown cost of implementing novel urban design elements. Strict budgets and government approval processes make it challenging for developers to trial new approaches, meaning most developments rarely deviate from ‘business-as-usual’ (BAU). Further research is urgently needed to overcome this barrier to innovation and help [...]
Towards comparability among state-and-transition models: A set of generalised templates linked to ecosystem condition
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Growing commitments to environmental sustainability and nature conservation by industry, government and communities globally have led to a pressing need for consistent methods to characterise and quantify outcomes of land use and ecological restoration. State-and-transition models (STMs) are widely used to describe and communicate knowledge about ecosystem dynamics and are increasingly applied in [...]
Expanding the sentinel approach through multimodal integration: resolving underlying ecological processes with eDNA and computer vision
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Sentinel approaches provide a semi-controlled method for quantifying in-field ecological interactions and processes while reducing bias and labour. They are, however, limited by difficulties ascribing taxonomic identities, behavioural context and temporal resolution to interacting agents. The integration of additional sources of data, including the analysis of DNA left behind on sentinel objects [...]
Feeding Ecology and Conservation of the Mediterranean Monk Seal, (Monachus monachus)
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus) is one of the world’s most endangered pinnipeds, persisting as a small number of fragmented populations exposed to continuing anthropogenic pressure. Understanding its feeding ecology is therefore important not only for clarifying its trophic role and habitat use, but also for informing conservation actions related to fisheries overlap, prey [...]
Ecoregion drives intraspecific variation of secondary chemistry in a big sagebrush common garden
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phytochemistry plays an integral role in the health and survival of plants and can mediate community interactions, communication with neighboring plants, protection against disease and herbivores, and attraction of pollinators. We measured non-volatile compounds using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and volatile compounds using gas chromatography (GC) at two different time points [...]
Summarizing Populations: Characterizing the Effects of Sampling in Computational Evolutionary Replay Experiments
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Evolution
When we sample an evolving population, how well do we capture its long-term evolutionary potential? This question underlies the validity of analytical replay experiments, which restart evolution from multiple points in a population’s history to measure how long-term potential changed over time. Analytical replay experiments are becoming increasingly popular in both wet-lab and computational [...]
Reframing the habitat fragmentation debate around the inferential targets predicted by ecological theory
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
The habitat fragmentation debate has persisted for more than three decades because dominant empirical practice has often estimated a narrower quantity than the competing ecological theories jointly require. These frameworks differ not simply in whether fragmentation matters, but in how their predicted effects change along the habitat-amount gradient. The habitat amount hypothesis (HAH) predicts [...]