Preprints
There are 3472 Preprints listed.
Decoupling the dimensions of plant invasion success reveals divergent trait syndromes across invasion outcomes and growth forms
Published: 2026-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The number of invasive plant species and their impacts continue to increase globally, yet efforts to identify traits that reliably predict invasion success have produced inconsistent results. To address this challenge, we asked whether trait–invasion relationships vary across dimensions of invasion success and growth forms. Using 16 functional and niche traits for 622 invasive plant species [...]
Deep Learning for Combating Wildlife and Environmental Crime: A Survey
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Wildlife and Environmental Crime (WEC) describes illegal activities that threaten biodiversity and harm the environment. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has shown strong potential in combating WEC by learning complex patterns in data through the extraction of high-dimensional features. DL also offers powerful capabilities for prediction, classification, and object tracking, and has become an [...]
Centuries of provenance trials: towards predictive infrastructures for forest adaptation under climate change
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences
Provenance trials are among forestry's most valuable experimental legacies. Established over centuries to compare species and provenances, they laid the foundation for understanding local adaptation and supported tree breeding, but remained focused on growth, timber quality, and ranking provenances by performance. Climate change calls for a next generation of comparative trials that can help [...]
Nutrient Stress and Coral Health: Bridging Physiology, Holobiont Dynamics, and Molecular Mechanisms
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Nutrient stress acts as a multiscalar and context-dependent driver of coral reef decline primarily driven by anthropogenic interference. Decades of physiological and ecological studies have established that nutrient stress elicits physiological responses from corals, but reveal species-specific variability dependent on nutrient identity, concentration, and stoichiometry, as well as intricate [...]
varKodes extend DNA barcoding to ultrafine-grained identity, place, and state
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
DNA barcoding has transformed biodiversity science, but locus-based markers often fail across taxa, at shallow phylogenetic depths, and in mixed or spatially structured samples. Here, we test whether varKoder, an alignment-free framework that converts low-coverage genomic reads into image-based genomic signatures (varKodes), can extend barcoding from taxonomic identification to broader inference [...]
Species Traits Predict Local Population Change Above and Beyond Regional Trend
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Why do some populations persist in the face of environmental change while others decline? We tested the extent to which variation in local population change across species is attributable to three species traits: (i) habitat selectivity, (ii) temperature niche position, and (iii) degree of insectivory, with the null hypothesis that local trends are simply a reflection of broader regional trends. [...]
From open science to credible science: practical guidance for more transparent and robust causal claims in ecology and conservation
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Rigorous scientific evidence requires both “transparency in action” about the research process and “transparency in thought” about the assumptions and logic underlying decisions. The open science movement has emphasized transparency in action, including open data and code standards. In parallel, causal inference literature has emphasized transparency in thought, particularly around the [...]
Fire regime assumptions can drastically influence pyrodiversity-biodiversity relationships in heterogeneous forest landscapes
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Management, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Background. Higher spatio-temporal variation in fire regime attributes in fire-dominated landscapes (pyrodiversity) is thought to promote higher levels of biodiversity – the pyrodiversity-biodiversity hypothesis – yet this effect likely varies across taxa and systems. As a result, ecosystem-based management in heterogenous, fire-dominated forests requires understanding the strength and shape of [...]
Bacterial Evolution and Involution
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
In biology, the concept of evolution is often linked to an increase in directional complexity driven by particular selective landscapes. In contrast, involution is understood as the loss of adaptive gains achieved through evolution, leading to de-adaptation to the environment and eventually to extinction. However, the microecological heterogeneity of spaces occupied by bacteria necessarily makes [...]
Meeting Mediterranean conservation targets through systematic conservation planning
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
The ocean is increasingly being used by new human activities, fueled by an expansion of the “blue-economy” adding new pressures to the marine environment. These changes are happening fast, and balancing biodiversity conservation and present and future uses of the marine space needs to be done in an equitable way for human and ecological communities. Here, we used a systematic conservation [...]
Retrospective Analysis of Habitat Selection by Boreal Caribou in the Prince Albert Greater Ecosystem, Saskatchewan, Canada
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology
Recent caribou research in Saskatchewan has focused on faecal DNA analyses, which provide valuable information on caribou population size and connectivity but limited information on habitat use and selection. The delineation of Caribou Habitat Management Areas (CHMAs) and associated tiered management objectives are based in part on habitat potential mapping derived from an expert-based model. [...]
An assessment of biodiversity data shortfalls for ectomycorrhizal fungi in Canada
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Microbiology
Ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungi play critical roles in global carbon and nutrient cycling. In Canada, vast forest ecosystems dominated by EcM trees are experiencing rapid environmental and anthropogenic change that threaten the symbiosis. Here we quantify and discuss seven biodiversity data shortfalls that constrain our knowledge of EcM fungi in Canada, and impede the development of effective [...]
Exploiting a Key Physiological Feature of Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) for Selective, Non-Chemical Control in a Native Woodland Understory
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) is a highly invasive annual that outcompetes native understory plants in temperate woodlands, threatening biodiversity. Conventional control methods, such as herbicide application and mechanical cutting, often risk collateral damage to desirable native species. This study evaluates a novel, non-chemical control method that exploits Himalayan balsam’s [...]
How does drought disrupt the transfer of essential omega-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids (PUFA) from freshwater to terrestrial ecosystems?
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Freshwater and terrestrial food webs are connected via cross-ecosystem subsidies, including essential nutrients like omega-3 fatty acids that originate in the aquatic environment (microalgae) but support terrestrial consumers. Although global change stressors could be disrupting these linkages, most research to date has focused on subsidy quantity rather than quality. Here, we reviewed the [...]
Species recognition in herbaria and standing trees using an accessible portable spectrometer
Published: 2026-07-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Species identification in hyperdiverse regions such as the Amazon forest, is time-consuming and often prone to errors. In light of the current rapid biodiversity loss, developing fast and low-cost methods to support species identification in both field and herbarium samples is fundamental to improve the quality of tropical forest inventories. We tested two spectrometers - the high-performance [...]