Preprints
There are 3723 Preprints listed.
Modeling Decomposition: Beyond a Well-Mixed World
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Carbon cycle models overlook resource patchiness and networked foraging characterizing terrestrial carbon dynamics. They treat inputs as well mixed and decomposers as acting at local scales, making substrate stoichiometry, rather than spatial access, the primary constraint on decomposition. Using deadwood decomposition by cord-forming fungi and termites as examples, we illustrate how resource [...]
Common, consequential, and actively maintained: a neo-balance view of genetic variation
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A fundamental and still unfinished task of evolutionary biology is to understand the nature of genetic variation and the evolutionary forces that shape it. The traditional approach to this problem is through retrospective inference from patterns in contemporary, static DNA sequence data. The prevailing view that emerged from these studies and from theoretical research is that segregating genetic [...]
Evenness under incomplete sampling: coupled error channels, hidden compensation, and the richness-estimation bottleneck
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Normalized evenness combines an abundance-diversity functional with richness, so incomplete sampling acts through two coupled errors. For \(E_{\alpha,\beta}=L_\beta(D_\alpha)/L_\beta(S)\), the log-error decomposes exactly as \(T_\beta=U_\beta+V_\beta\). With observed richness, \(V_\beta\) is nonnegative whenever species are missed, but total error can have either sign. 2. We generated 950,100 [...]
Quantifying the probability of evolutionary rescue
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
While evolutionary rescue is now a well-established term, there are subtleties in precisely defining it and conceptual complications in quantifying its probability. In this Perspective, we pay special attention to three issues: 1) How do we know that a population would go extinct in the absence of evolution? 2) How do we determine the probability of rescue if persistence is possible in the [...]
Canyoning simplifies benthic macroinvertebrate communities in Mediterranean canyons: evidence from Sierra y Cañones de Guara Natural Park
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Recreational activities in freshwater ecosystems are increasing worldwide, yet their ecological consequences remain poorly understood. Canyoning is one of the most popular nature-based sports in Mediterranean rivers, but quantitative assessments of its effects on aquatic communities are scarce, particularly in protected areas where conservation and recreation coexist. Here, we evaluated how [...]
A synthesis of bird biodiversity studies in geographically isolated wetlands reveals research synergies and opportunities
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Geographically isolated wetlands represent integral foraging and breeding habitat for many bird species across the United States, yet few studies have attempted to synthesize existing research to quantify generalizable relationships between bird biodiversity and geographically isolated wetlands. We conduct a systematic review of bird biodiversity in geographically isolated wetlands of the [...]
Reconsidering interspecific co-occurrence of native and invasive plants in an anthropogenic riparian ecosystem
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Sciences
Invasive non-native plants are considered mostly though negative interactions, but are increasingly recognized as potential contributors to ecosystem functioning. By modifying microhabitats, resource availability and species interactions, non-natives plants may reshape and maintain the living conditions of native plant communities. We conducted an observational field study to quantify the [...]
TaxonBodyMassML: Taxonomy-informed prediction of body mass using gradient-boosted trees
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Body mass is a key ecological trait governing metabolic rates, life-history characteristics, interaction strengths, and community structure and dynamics. Despite its centrality to ecology and ecological modelling, direct body mass measurements exist for only a small fraction of all scientifically described species. 2. We present TaxonBodyMassML, a machine-learning tool to predict the body [...]
Patterns of wind dispersal within a forest canopy: An epiphyte perspective
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Plant dispersal theory has largely been developed from a terrestrial perspective, in which interception by vegetation is considered a loss, and success is defined by arrival at suitable ground-level habitat. True epiphytes—non-parasitic plants structurally dependent on a host throughout their lives—represent a striking reversal of this framework: their diaspores must be intercepted by suitable [...]
On the Promise (and Practice) of Deep Comparative Methods: Expressivity, Limitations, and Design
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
Comparative biologists explain the diversity of organismal form and function by deciding which traits to measure and which evolutionary processes to model. These decisions make inference possible, but they also confine it to traits, relationships, and processes that can be specified a priori. Neural networks can expand this space, learning characters directly from complex observations and [...]
Building from biodiversity assessment to place-based conservation action across scales of information and governance.
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Scientific assessments of biodiversity and ecosystem services are challenged by the need to examine systemic drivers of change while maintaining support in a polarized political climate. Recent US national policy shifts that reduce federal support for scientific assessments underscore the necessity of a broad-based, resilient, and scalable assessment framework with sustained engagement of [...]
Timelines of vegetation recovery following fire in a shrub-dominated Mediterranean-type ecosystem
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Fire is a natural disturbance in many Mediterranean-type ecosystems, but wildfires are increasing in frequency and severity in many places worldwide, including California. Vegetation recovery following wildfire is critical for landscape stability and foundational to resilience of many ecosystem processes in the years and decades that follow fire. While remote sensing tools are increasingly [...]
Aligning evidence and action: The Research-to-Decision (RED) Framework to address modern environmental and ecological challenges
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Databases and Information Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Models and Methods, Multivariate Analysis, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
Ecological and biodiversity crises are intensifying amid rapid advances in sensing, computation, and artificial intelligence (AI). AI offers unprecedented capabilities to understand complex ecological systems, provided outputs are interpretable, applied responsibly, and evaluated by domain experts. When addressing key challenges, science-policy frictions arise through different requirements [...]
Disentangling the drivers of parasite occurrence in a native and a non-native small mammal across a land-use gradient
Published: 2026-09-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Parasitology
Land-use change can reorganize host--parasite systems by altering environmental conditions, host communities, and transmission pathways. Yet parasite occurrence remains difficult to predict as it is shaped simultaneously by the environment, host identity, individual host attributes, the within-host microbiome, and parasite biology. We integrated these components within a single framework for two [...]
Why nature cannot be replaced: the limits of substitution in biodiversity conservation
Published: 2026-09-25
Subjects: Biodiversity
Contemporary conservation governance increasingly relies on biodiversity offsetting and related instruments that seek to compensate ecological losses from development projects through metric-based equivalence and No Net Loss accounting. In their dominant policy form, these approaches treat biodiversity as substitutable: damage at one site is rendered acceptable if equivalent gains are generated [...]