Preprints
There are 3572 Preprints listed.
Candidozyma auris (Candida auris) as a harbinger of novel fungal pathogens
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Medical Microbiology, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Pathogenic Microbiology
Mammals are protected from fungal pathogens by two evolutionary pillars: adaptive immunity and elevated body temperature. Anthropogenic climate change is eroding this thermal barrier, while a concurrent decline in human basal body temperature accelerates convergence from both directions. The emergence of Candidozyma auris (Candida auris), a thermotolerant, multidrug-resistant pathogen that arose [...]
Regional specificity without methodological fragmentation: a perspective on invasion-risk screening of Mediterranean freshwater fishes
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Regional ecological context is essential in invasion-risk screening but need not require development of a region-specific decision-support tool. The Mediterranean specificity of the Hellenic Risk Assessment (HeRA), developed for freshwater fishes in Greece, has been presented as a principal advantage over the globally employed Invasiveness Screening Kit (ISK) tools. In this Perspective, I show [...]
The intensity of sexual selection and the absence of assortative mating patterns in Prunella modularis (Aves: Passeriformes)
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
When females and males prefer large mating partners, a size-assortative mating pattern can occur, and larger individuals tend to obtain more partners, thereby increasing the intensity of sexual selection. Considering this, we studied a population of dunnocks (Prunella modularis), a species with a variable mating system. We tested whether (A) assortativity (based on body size and/or condition) [...]
From environmental heterogeneity to stability: beta-diversity stabilises biomass across space
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how biodiversity influences ecosystem stability across heterogeneous landscapes is a central challenge in ecology. The spatial insurance hypothesis proposes that turnover in species composition stabilises ecosystem processes in heterogeneous environments by allowing species to occupy the habitats where they perform best. Yet, empirical evidence remains mixed, partly due to [...]
What Predictive Brains Inherit: An Evolutionary Account of Cognition
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Predictive and Bayesian frameworks explain how organisms weigh expectation against evidence, but not where the ingredients come from - what counts as a signal, what counts as a good outcome, which hypotheses and actions are available at all. We argue these are historical products, not formal assumptions, and hypothesise how they were built. Cognition is chained together by conditional necessity: [...]
Quantification of the Urban Public Open Space for Metropolitan Municipalities in Mexico Using OpenStreetMap
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
This is the first study to quantify urban public open space and its accessibility across all metropolitan municipalities in Mexico, following a methodology similar to that proposed by UN-Habitat for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11.7. It relies exclusively on open data from official sources, National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics (INEGI), the Ministry of Agrarian, [...]
Overcoming limitations in selection guidelines for state-of-nature metrics in corporate assessments
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
The development and adoption of frameworks to help organisations understand, monitor, and disclose their biodiversity risks and impacts have accelerated due to Target 15 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Organisations are increasingly expected not only to measure their biodiversity pressures and responses, but also to demonstrate whether their actions lead to negative or [...]
Soil microbial communities and reciprocal distributions of nitrogen-cycling proxies beneath legume and non-legume patches in a disturbed orchard
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
The belowground interactions between plants and soil microbial communities play an important role in the recovery of historically disturbed land. However, these relationships remain poorly understood at fine spatial scales. In this exploratory study, we characterized bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic soil communities beneath five plant types (red clover, white clover, fescue, chicory, and [...]
Increase, decrease, or both: A systematic review of mosquito population response to floods
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Parasitic Diseases, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Virus Diseases
Floods are increasing in frequency and severity under the ongoing climate change and are widely reported to alter mosquito population dynamics. However, the direction, magnitude, and consistency of this effect across mosquito species and flood contexts remain poorly studied. This systematic review synthesizes empirical evidence on mosquito species population responses to disastrous flood events [...]
Five First Records from a Half-Century Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta) Communal Nesting Aggregation: Predation, Mortality, Nesting Phenology, and a Decade of Nest Protection
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
We describe a half-century communal nesting aggregation of the Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta), a species of conservation concern, at a single restored prairie–savanna site along a tributary of the Namekagon River in northwest Wisconsin, USA, monitored since the 1970s and protected with successive structures since 2015, and we report five natural-history findings from the site that are, to our [...]
Flexible Resource Use but Consistent Parental Care across Populations in a Nocturnal Raptor
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Parental investment is often quantified by how much food offspring receive, yet parental behaviour throughout the breeding phase and the timing and composition of resource delivery may be equally important. We tested this by integrating behaviour, diet and activity rhythms in two populations of tawny owl (Strix aluco) in northern Europe. Parental behaviour followed conserved temporal patterns [...]
The Defensive Repertoire of New World Coral Snakes: Evolution and Natural History
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
The defensive repertoire of New World coral snakes is diverse, but its evolutionary history remains poorly understood. We compiled 280 records of 11 defensive behaviors across 85 species of Micrurus and one species of Micruroides from the literature and contributions by researchers, naturalists, and wildlife photographers. Fifty-seven records represented behaviors not previously documented for [...]
iPhone Lidar Can Accurately Capture Fine-Scale Understorey Vegetation Structure
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Complex vegetation structure increases ecosystem resilience, but fine-scale understorey vegetation is often overlooked in monitoring protocols despite subtle variation impacting overall diversity. iPhone lidar has placed cost effective and portable remote sensing technology in the pockets of researchers, farmers, practitioners, and citizens worldwide to conduct continuous monitoring and improve [...]
A Priori Prediction of Population Growth of Parnassius smintheus.
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
A priori testing of a model, i.e., predicting an event before it happens, is the gold standard for model validation. This model testing approach steps up ecological modeling beyond simply explaining the past to proactive predictive modeling by challenging the ability of theories to make accurate forecasts before new data are collected, a litmus test of how well we understand the systems we study. [...]
Conspecific Gamete Precedence in Speciation: History, Evidence, and a Research Roadmap
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Barriers to hybridization can act between gamete release and fertilisation. When an egg donor has simultaneous access to conspecific and heterospecific pollen or sperm, competitive interactions can bias fertilisation towards conspecific gametes, producing conspecific gamete precedence (CGP). Although such biases were first reported more than 250 years ago, CGP remains poorly integrated into the [...]