Preprints
There are 3185 Preprints listed.
Functional diversity of tundra vascular plants over space and time
Published: 2026-04-28
Subjects: Biodiversity
Aim: Rapid warming across the tundra biome is driving widespread changes in vascular plant community composition. While species turnover is well-documented, the ramifications for tundra functional diversity are unknown. Here, we quantify biome-scale spatial gradients and temporal trends in the functional diversity of tundra vegetation for the first time. Location: A biome-scale synthesis of in [...]
Representational limits in detecting ecological change
Published: 2026-04-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Biotechnology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Food Science, Forest Sciences, Genetics and Genomics, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Other Life Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Physiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Systems Biology
Detecting ecological change remains a persistent challenge, even in systems with extensive monitoring data and increasingly sophisticated analytical tools. Uncertainty is usually attributed to stochasticity, limited observations, or imperfect models. Here, I argue that an additional and largely overlooked constraint arises from representational limits: systematic ways in which graphs, indicators, [...]
Virtual Population Analysis of the critically endangered Scalloped Hammerhead (Sphyrna lewini) in the Eastern Tropical Pacific
Published: 2026-04-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
The scalloped hammerhead (Sphyrna lewini) is one of the most critically endangered shark species in the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP). Despite its wide distribution and relatively high fecundity, overfishing and bycatch have led to sustained population declines across the region. We developed a spatially implicit, stage-structured, two-sex virtual population model for the ETP population of S. [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the East Central and Southeast Australian Shelf
Published: 2026-04-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the East Central and Southeast Australian Shelf is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Bassian, Cape Howe, Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands, Manning-Hawkesbury, Tweed-Moreton, and Western Bassian. The East Central and Southeast Australian Shelf mangrove province mapped extent in 2020 was 462.2 km2, [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Northwest Australian and Sahul Shelf
Published: 2026-04-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Northwest Australia and Sahul shelf is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Arafura Sea, Arnhem Coast to Gulf of Carpentaria, Bonaparte Coast, Exmouth to Broome, Gulf of Papua, Houtman, Lesser Sunda, Ningaloo, Shark Bay, Southeast Papua New Guinea and Torres Strait Northern Great Barrier Reef. In [...]
Wolf – human interactions in a shared landscape: spatio-temporal distribution and visitors' perception in The Hoge Veluwe National Park
Published: 2026-04-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Large carnivores are increasingly recolonizing human-dominated landscapes, yet the mechanisms enabling their persistence in intensively used landscapes and how this shapes risk perception and tolerance remain insufficiently understood. In particular, few studies have integrated fine-scale ecological data with on-site assessments of visitor perceptions from the same recreational area. Using the [...]
Status and conservation assessment of southern marginal populations of the Golden Eagle Aquila chrysaetos under IUCN criteria
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) is one of the most widely distributed raptors worldwide and is currently classified as Least Concern at the global scale. However, global assessments may obscure pronounced regional asymmetries in population status and extinction risk, particularly at the geographical margins of a species’ range. At the southern edge of its distribution, encompassing the [...]
Plasmidomics: studying plasmids as ecological entities beyond their hosts
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Bacteriology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences
Plasmids are autonomous mobile genetic elements whose ecology extends beyond individual bacterial hosts. As molecular symbionts, they traverse strains, species, and environments, disseminating adaptive genes and shaping microbial community structure through dynamics that are often decoupled from host taxonomy. Plasmidomics—the omics discipline dedicated to the study of plasmids—has revealed that [...]
Expanding the uptake of conservation technology: insights from efforts to share conservation bioacoustics capacity in Indonesia and Malaysia
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) of terrestrial habitats has grown exponentially over the last three decades, given recent technological advances and the utility of this approach in providing information on acoustically active animals, their habitats, and human activities across large spatial and temporal scales. Yet, just 1% of PAM studies were conducted in Southeast Asia, despite the region’s [...]
What do ecology and evolutionary biology journal websites communicate about their policies and preferences regarding replication studies?
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The replication of prior research is a cornerstone of the scientific process and valued as such in ecology and evolutionary biology. However, it appears replication studies are nowhere near as prevalent in the published literature as might be expected if they were a routine part of building confidence in research findings. This may be due in part to the widespread perception of replication [...]
The human handprint in shaping plant diversity in urban environments
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Urban plant assemblages comprise mixtures of native and non-native species distributed across a variety of urban green space (UGS) types, yet we lack an integrated understanding of how plant diversity and composition varies across UGS that differ in the degree to which communities arise through self-assembly versus human facilitation. Here, we address the gap based on a comprehensive dataset of [...]
Dwarf males function as males but retain female-biased transcriptional profiles in an androdioecious barnacle
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences
Sexual systems exhibit remarkable diversity, yet how alternative reproductive strategies are implemented at the level of gene expression remains poorly understood. In androdioecious species, males coexist with hermaphrodites and function exclusively as sperm donors, raising the question of whether the males’ transcriptional profiles are fully masculinized or retain features of hermaphroditic [...]
Molecular War and Peace: the Concurrent Path to Antibiosis and Antibiotic Resistance
Published: 2026-04-23
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
The possibility of the emergence of proto-antibiotic and proto-resistance molecules in the prebiotic world, as primary elements involved in “molecular wars,” is examined in this conceptual review. Throughout the Earth's early history, prebiotic chemical processes produced molecules that associated both randomly and persistently. Over time, those configurations that achieved greater stability were [...]
Novel citation-based indices exacerbate privilege gaps in academic publishing
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Scholarly Publishing
An undeniable fact of modern academia is that it is metric-driven, a landscape in which researchers are narrowly defined by their publication output and citations. The demand for simple methods for defining our output has led to many popular citation-based metrics, used as shorthand for academic output both at higher levels of funding and day-to-day assessments. Despite the flaws being [...]
MASTHING: a process-based model of mast seeding in European beech
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Physiology, Plant Sciences
Masting, the synchronised interannual variation in seed production, shapes forest regeneration and many ecosystem processes, yet process-based models remain underdeveloped. Here we introduce MASTHING (MASting THeory modellING), an individual-tree model coupling phenology, carbon gain, resource storage, temperature cues, and environmental vetoes on reproduction. We parameterised MASTHING for [...]