Preprints
There are 3145 Preprints listed.
An Evaluation of 15 Years of Community-Based Monitoring in Forest Stewardship Council Certified Forest Areas in Southern Tanzania: Insights from Mammal and Indicator Bird Species
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Community-based Research, Forest Management
Certified community-managed forests are rare in East Africa, and the use of community-based biomonitoring to track biodiversity change in such forests is rarer still. We analyse 15 years of community-collected data on mammals and indicator bird species from 10 village land forest reserves in southern coastal Tanzania, managed under a Forest Stewardship Council certification scheme facilitated by [...]
An energetic unification of ecological theory
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Ecological communities can persist for long periods despite strong competition and environmental variability, yet they can also reorganize or collapse abruptly after seemingly modest change. Explaining persistence, diversity, and collapse has produced several major traditions in ecology, including species-interaction models, consumer--resource theory, coexistence theory, feasibility analysis, and [...]
Acute bacterial challenge in Drosophila reveals age and sex dependent feeding and macronutrient choice without generalised anorexia
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Entomology, Integrative Biology, Zoology
Sickness behaviours are often interpreted as adaptive host responses that reallocate resources from performance to defence. Anorexia - a reduction in food intake - is one of the most frequently cited examples, yet evidence across insects is variable and rarely separates the effects of wounding, immune stimulation, and live infection. Here we use a factorial design in Drosophila melanogaster to [...]
Molecular identification and diversity assessment of Tyrrhenian Romulea species (iridaceae)
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Plant Sciences
Taxonomic assignments based only on morphology are often insufficient for delimiting species, particularly in polyploid complexes with extensive morphological overlap. This limitation hinders biogeographic and conservation issues. The genus Romulea (Iridaceae), distributed across Africa and the Mediterranean Basin, exemplifies this challenge. Despite its remarkable diversity, Mediterranean [...]
Microplastics and forest fungi: A review and call for comprehensive research
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fungi are the main drivers of the global carbon and nutrient cycle and act as ecosystem engineers in forest ecosystems by regulating primary production and decomposition. Moreover, fungi are among the most diverse organisms in forest ecosystems and affect almost all forest microhabitats, from the canopy to the soil. In contrast to aquatic and agricultural ecosystems, forest ecosystems have [...]
A unified framework for phylogenetic and spatial meta-analysis: concepts, implementation, and practical guidance
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Meta-analyses in ecology and evolution, and related fields, can include effect sizes structured by shared evolutionary history or spatial distance. In this tutorial paper, we show that phylogenetic and spatial meta-analyses can be formulated within the same theoretical framework based on correlated random effects. From this perspective, the two approaches differ only in how distance is defined: [...]
When does sampling uncertainty matter in matrix population models? Evidence from published projection matrices
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
1. The collation of thousands of population projection matrices in the COM(P)ADRE Matrix Databases has enabled large-scale comparative analyses in ecology, evolution, and demography. A persistent challenge is that transition rates are estimated from finite samples, yet the resulting sampling uncertainty is rarely reported and typically ignored in downstream analyses. Although sampling uncertainty [...]
Reporting on the extent of natural ecosystems under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Biodiversity
Unlike its predecessors, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework emphasises ecosystems in its targets, goals, and monitoring framework. This novelty means that Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity are now expected to report on this component of biodiversity for the first time. Here we surveyed how Parties reported on Headline Indicator A.2 (Extent of Natural Ecosystems) in [...]
Why are embodied social signals concentrated towards the rostral region? — The rostrum concentration hypothesis
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biological Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Although frequently embodied, the relationship of animal social communication with body layout has rarely been investigated from a unified cognitive perspective. Across animal taxa, socially relevant signals, ranging from facial expressions and gaze to colouration and morphology, are strikingly concentrated towards the anterior region of the body. Here, we propose the Rostrum Concentration [...]
Multi-scale collapse of coral cover under climate change
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Biology, Dynamic Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Marine Biology, Mathematics, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Survival Analysis, Systems Biology
Projecting ecosystem trajectories under future climates is critical for conservation planning, yet remains constrained by uncertainty arising from limited data, ecological complexity, and biological and environmental variability. Variability, when disentangled from uncertainty, offers critical insights into population and community dynamics. For example, enhanced vital rates (growth, survival, [...]
MCT-05: Un marco de evaluación para la planificación de la restauración fluvial. Validación con 9 años de datos de seguimiento de un río mediterráneo.
Published: 2026-04-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Long-term monitoring of Mediterranean rivers often reveals contrasting ecological trajectories even where restoration interventions are similar. These long-term datasets provide limited guidance for interpreting whether observed changes reflect structural ecological condition or temporal variability of indicators. Using nine years of monitoring data from 21 stations in the Ripoll River (NE [...]
The signal of admixture can decay rapidly when using clustering-based methods
Published: 2026-04-08
Subjects: Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics
Gene flow shapes evolutionary trajectories by introducing novel alleles, facilitating or retarding adaptation, or eroding divergence among populations. Studies commonly infer gene flow through estimates of genetic admixture from methods that cluster individuals by allele-frequency similarity. However, the ability of these methods to reliably detect historical admixture remains poorly understood, [...]
What is the human germline mutation rate? methodological innovations, challenges, and evolutionary implications
Published: 2026-04-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Germline mutations are the ultimate source of heritable genetic variation, driving evolution, enabling adaptation, and underlying disease. Despite their fundamental importance, key questions remain unanswered: How frequently do germline mutations arise? Do mutation rates vary systematically across individuals, populations, and local genomic context? And what determines whether a mutation arising [...]
Unraveling contaminant effects on biodiversity across scales: the macroecotoxicology perspective
Published: 2026-04-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health
With the spread of contaminants across the globe, ecosystems are increasingly exposed to pollutants at varying levels of biological organization. The effects of a wide range of contaminants on individuals have been extensively studied within the discipline of ecotoxicology, but understanding the generality of species’ responses across taxa and ecosystems remains a major challenge. This is because [...]
Harry Potter shows mirror to dire wolf de-extinction: perils of chasing ghosts of species’ past
Published: 2026-04-08
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Abstract 1. Conservation faces a paradox. As urban expansion and industrial-scale agriculture erode relational values between people and nature, a privileged minority dictates global biodiversity narratives. This shift is reinforced by media and technological interventions that frequently override lived, local experiences. For instance, gene editing tools like CRISPR are incorporated for [...]