Preprints
There are 2563 Preprints listed.
Dietary preferences and behaviour of the Southern Lesser Bushbaby Galago moholi (Loriformes: Galagidae) foraging at an entomological light trap
Published: 2025-09-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
The Southern Lesser Bushbaby Galago moholi is a small, nocturnal, strepsirrhine primate, native to Sub-Saharan Africa. Previously considered a strict dietary specialist on tree exudates and insects, recent observations have revealed hitherto unappreciated plasticity in its feeding behaviour, encompassing fruits and even small vertebrates. While arthropods are an important seasonal component of [...]
Introduced urban lizards (Podarcis muralis) exhibit environmentally plastic activity patterns and precise behavioral thermoregulation
Published: 2025-09-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Integrative Biology, Zoology
The ability to effectively thermoregulate is important for most ectotherms, as body temperature determines the rate of nearly all physiological processes. However, for most organisms we lack understanding of which environmental factors affect thermoregulatory behaviors, especially outside of a laboratory setting, and how individual behaviors scale over an entire day and at the population level. [...]
Beyond the green: Socioeconomic and climatic pressures on native vegetation in the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor
Published: 2025-09-14
Subjects: Biology
This study examines how climatic and socioeconomic variables influence native vegetation cover across 108 municipalities within the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor (ABC), an ecologically strategic region in central Brazil that connects Amazonian and Cerrado biomes and supports habitat continuity for wide-ranging species such as jaguars (Panthera onca). The corridor was defined as a 40 km-wide [...]
Vendi Information Gain for Active Learning and its Application to Ecology
Published: 2025-09-14
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity
While monitoring biodiversity through camera traps has become an important endeavor for ecological research, identifying species in the captured image data remains a major bottleneck due to limited labeling resources. Active learning—a machine learning paradigm that selects the most informative data to label and train a predictive model—offers a promising solution, but typically focuses on [...]
Inferring the dynamics of selective constraints across complex ontogenies
Published: 2025-09-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Most organisms undergo a series of complex phenotypic changes throughout their life cycles that allow them to meet the demands of different niches throughout ontogeny. Theory suggests the significant coordination required to undergo such ontogenetic transitions can impose evolutionary constraints on variation to developmental programs. This produces patterns known as developmental hourglasses, [...]
Mitochondrial genome evolution: the influence of partitioning, calibration, and gene heterogeneity on pleurodontan substitution rates
Published: 2025-09-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Molecular Genetics
Substitution rate estimates are a key source of information in modern evolutionary biology, underpinning divergence time inference and other evolutionary analyses. Mitochondrial DNA nucleotide substitution rates, in particular, are commonly used for these purposes. However, these rates are typically derived from a small set of genes, closely related species, or from a limited number of model [...]
The Brightening Sky and the Bug's Advance: Unraveling the Drivers of Oxycarenus lavaterae Range Expansion
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Analyzing the Lime Seed Bug's (Oxycarenus lavaterae) European range expansion, optimized Maxent models and comprehensive occurrence data (2007-2025) reveal a swift northward and eastward spread, with a distinct "rapid expansion" phase starting in 2017. Key drivers include minimum and maximum temperatures, and importantly, downward shortwave radiation (DSR). Increased DSR, linked to [...]
Landscape drivers of population density of a vulnerable apex predator (Wilkerr/dingo)
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Apex predators shape ecosystems globally, yet robust monitoring that assesses the effects of management actions and environmental variation on their populations is challenging. The dingo, Australia’s largest terrestrial predator, is ecologically and culturally significant. In many parts of Australia, dingoes now exist in fragmented and isolated populations, and our understanding of how their [...]
Epi-eDNA: From Methylation Signal Detection to Functional Ecological Monitoring
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Environmental DNA (eDNA) technology has revolutionized biomonitoring, primarily capturing the presence/absence of target taxa. Recent advances have revealed that eDNA also retains epigenetic signatures (epi-eDNA), particularly DNA methylation, which enable functional ecological insights. This review synthesizes three pivotal milestones: (1) Initial detection of methylation signals in eDNA, [...]
Ecosystem dynamics in dry heathlands: spatial and temporal effects of environmental drivers on the vegetation
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
To understand and estimate the effects of environmental drivers on temperate dry heathland vegetation, pin-point cover data from 102 Danish sites sampled during a 16-year period was regressed onto selected environmental variables. The effects of nitrogen deposition, soil pH, soil C-N ratio, soil type, precipitation and grazing on the heathland vegetation was modelled in a spatio-temporal [...]
squidSim: a flexible R package for structured and reproducible simulations in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistical Methodology
1. Complex statistical methodology now allows a growing array of questions to be addressed in ecology and evolutionary biology. However, the particular question being addressed or the complex nature of the data collected often raise issues with how statistical models perform and potentially limit inference. Simulations provide a powerful approach to help empiricists understand the assumptions, [...]
Fish biodiversity survey of small water bodies in the Nkhotakota District, Malawi.
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
We surveyed 6 small lakes and the lower reaches of the Kaombe River in Nkhotakota District of Malawi (in 2 seasons; rainy and dry hot seasons), primarily to determine if two species previously reported only from Lake Chilingali were still present in the area following the collapse of the Chilingali Dam in 2012 and failure to rediscover the species in 2016 and subsequently. We report that [...]
When and How to Use Restricted Spatial Regression to Separate Environmental Effects from Spatial Confounding
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aim: To provide practical guidance for ecologists on when to use standard spatial generalized linear mixed models (SGLMMs) versus Restricted Spatial Regression (RSR). We reframe the debate by arguing the choice depends on whether the total effect or direct effect of covariates will be more transferable across space. Innovation: Our study's primary innovation is to introduce a causal framework to [...]
Unequal Thermal Risks in a Socioeconomically Important Tropical Reef Fishery
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Climate change poses an understudied threat to the coastal reef systems of the Western Indian Ocean (WIO), a biodiversity hotspot critical for the maintenance of subsistence fisheries. The southwestern coast of Madagascar is especially sensitive to disturbances due to the high level of socioecological dependence on functioning reefs. Fishing in this region is spatially structured. For example, [...]
Spatial variation and individual specialization of stickleback diet in relation to trophic morphology
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
A population's dietary niche, including individual variation and specialization, shapes the scope and strength of its trophic linkages. Individual diet variation may emerge in response to spatial variation in the selective pressures that shape trophic morphologies, such as food availability or competition. Therefore, characterizing dietary niche variation and its link to morphological differences [...]