Preprints
There are 3161 Preprints listed.
First record of Poa cf. annua on Fildes Peninsula (King George Island), a major human-access node in Antarctica
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems are highly species-poor and particularly vulnerable to biological invasions. Poa annua L. is the only non-native flowering plant known to have established a persistent, self-sustaining population in Antarctica, with confirmed occurrences on King George Island near the H. Arctowski Polish Antarctic Station and the Ecology Glacier forefield. Here we report a new [...]
Ecosystem condition assessments: A context-specific workflow to integrate local expert knowledge and remote sensing
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite decades of conservation science, we still struggle with a deceptively simple question: how do we know if an ecosystem is in good or poor condition? We present a reproducible, six-step workflow for assessing ecosystem condition using remote sensing, ecological knowledge, and expert validation. The approach is designed to be applied consistently across diverse biomes, while remaining [...]
Evolutionary arms race between transposable elements and human genes: telomere-to-telomere genome comprehensive analysis identifies young L1 clusters in the interferon-alpha domain
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Transposable elements (TEs) have played a central role in major evolutionary transitions across the human lineage, from eukaryogenesis to the emergence of the eutherian placenta, and are currently reactivated in cancer and autoimmune diseases. The availability of the complete telomere-to-telomere (T2T) human genome assembly enables comprehensive investigation of TE contributions to gene [...]
Resource abundance can buffer trophic mismatch in a caterpillar-passerine food-chain
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Phenological mismatch occurs where variation in the magnitude of the response to environmental cues among species disrupts previously synchronised interspecific interactions, posing a risk to ecosystems as the climate changes. Understanding how ecological and environmental factors modulate the fitness effects of mismatch is essential for forecasting its impacts. Here, we analyse trophic mismatch [...]
Aliens Are Likely to Be Smart But Not “Intelligent”: What Evolution of Cognition on Earth Tells Us about Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
How likely is it that we will find aliens like the ones in so many science fiction stories–people who possess self-awareness and cognitive ability comparable to ours, but who arose from an independent evolutionary origin? Here I make the argument that if life has evolved on other planets, it may well eventually acquire complexity equivalent to that found on Earth. The resulting lifeforms may be [...]
FGMLab: An open-source software for teaching biological evolution through Fisher's geometric model
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Education
The process of biological evolution is typically taught through the lens of population genetics, where students are presented with models and diagrams of how alleles (genetic variants) change in frequency over time. While this convention depicts the underlying genetic basis of biological evolution, it fails to quantitatively illustrate how traits, on which natural selection actually acts, evolve. [...]
Nature-based Solutions for Climate and Disaster Risk Mitigation in SIPLAS: A Framework for Policy Integration and Innovative Financing
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Small island protected areas face compounding pressures from rapid urbanization, constrained land use, biodiversity loss, and intensifying climate and disaster risk, yet scholarship on how to finance and mainstream Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in governance-complex, nationally protected island systems remains limited. This study addresses that gap by examining the integration of NbS into climate [...]
Human Homosexuality, Transsexuality and Evolution: A Critical Appraisal
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Homosexual behavior occurs naturally in many species of mammals. Among primates, homosexuality is an evolutionary innovation originating when the anthropoid lineage split from the prosimian linage, becoming prominent in socially complex old world primates. Many species possess multiple genders: multiple morphs within each sex. Homosexual behavior and transgender expression occur across all [...]
Amphibian communities are structured by local habitat quality in garden ponds and spatial factors in urban ponds
Published: 2026-04-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Amphibians are among the most threatened vertebrates, and urbanisation contributes to their decline through habitat loss, fragmentation, pollution, and the spread of invasive species. At the same time, urban freshwater habitats, such as ponds, can serve as important refuges within highly modified landscapes. While the role of urban ponds in supporting freshwater biodiversity is increasingly [...]
Heterogeneity in Statistics: A Conceptual and Methodological Review
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Heterogeneity—the presence of meaningful variation across observations, in models, and in inferences—is a foundational concept in statistics that has many meanings. This review synthesizes the evolution of the meanings, methodologies, and interpretations of the four dominant and interconnected types of heterogeneity: (1) heteroscedasticity (non-constant variance), historically treated as a [...]
Sample size shapes metabarcoding-driven biodiversity assessments across body sizes in soil
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Life Sciences
Understanding how sample size influences biodiversity detection across taxonomic groups differing in body size is critical for designing robust and cost-efficient metabarcoding studies of soil eukaryotes. Using a soil mass gradient (0.25-32 g) combined with a universal 18S rRNA metabarcoding approach, we quantified how sample mass shapes diversity estimates across eukaryotic taxa. Diversity [...]
Silver spoon effect: Natal noise exposition is associated with telomere dynamics in adult birds
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology
Anthropogenic noise disturbance on wildlife is of growing concern. Environmental noise exposure during incubation can negatively impact fitness in wild birds. Here, we hypothesised that chronic noise introduces stress through oxidative damage to embryos, reflected in short-term fitness reduction and long-term physiological changes. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the effects of chronic [...]
Older forests recover faster: leaf litter arthropods reveal post-perturbation recolonization dynamics
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how ecological communities recover from disturbance is central to predicting ecosystem resilience, particularly in tropical forests where biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are tightly linked. Such landscapes are dominated by secondary forests that have experienced, and continue to experience, disturbances of varying intensity. Leaf litter arthropods play a crucial role in [...]
drmr: A Bayesian approach to Dynamic Range Models in R
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Predicting how species distributions will respond to environmental change is a critical challenge. Dynamic Range Models (DRMs) offer a powerful mechanistic approach by explicitly modeling the influence of environmental drivers on demographic processes. However, the widespread adoption of DRMs has been hindered by their inherent complexity and a critical gap in the available software. While many [...]
The Evolution of Interdependent Cell Cycles During the Transition to Multicellularity
Published: 2026-04-13
Subjects: Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In the evolution of complex multicellular organisms, cells that were once autonomous became obligately dependent on one another for survival and reproduction. Despite its importance, the process by which autonomous cellular machinery was restructured into obligately interdependent networks is poorly understood. Addressing this gap requires a framework that clearly categorizes the different levels [...]