Preprints
There are 2639 Preprints listed.
The SORTEE Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Open data and code are crucial to increasing transparency and reproducibility, and in building trust in scientific research. However, despite an increasing number of journals in ecology and evolutionary biology mandating for data and code to be archived alongside published articles, the amount and quality of archived data and code, and subsequent reproducibility of results, has remained [...]
Flower constancy in pollinators: a bouquet of agendas shapes interactions among mutualistic partners
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Plant-pollinator interactions have become a major research area due to their impact on key ecosystem services. One pollinator behaviour of particular importance is flower constancy, i.e. the tendency of pollinators to temporarily specialise on one flower species during a foraging trip, thereby promoting cross-pollination. The costs and benefits of flower constancy for both plants and pollinators [...]
From Shorelines to Social Media: Mixed-Methods Insights into Urban Fishing Practices, Policy Gaps and Culture in the Digital Age
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recreational and subsistence fishing are globally significant forms of marine resource use, contributing to food security, cultural identity, and social well-being across diverse coastal communities. Yet these non-commercial sectors are often overlooked in formal fisheries monitoring and governance. In California’s San Francisco Bay Area, non-commercial fishers represent a wide range of [...]
Connectivity, Fire, and Land Use: Understanding Platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) Persistence in Fragmented Watersheds
Published: 2025-08-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Aim: Effective biodiversity conservation requires improved understanding of species distributions, and of the influence of threatening processes on those distributions. This is particularly important for freshwater species, which are difficult to survey even as they are exposed to disproportionately high levels of threat. Here we address this issue for the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), an [...]
Revisiting evolution at the rear edge
Published: 2025-08-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Rear-edge populations occur at species’ warmer range limits, with many still occupying glacial refugia. They offer valuable insights into evolution under changing climates yet are underused as models. From two decades of research, we identify three equally likely evolutionary patterns in rear edges: high levels of genetic diversity and differentiation, elevated genetic drift, and strong local [...]
Connectivity for the conservation of Borneo’s biodiversity
Published: 2025-08-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ecological connectivity is fundamental to biodiversity conservation and climate adaptation, facilitating species movement, genetic exchange, and ecological function across landscapes. In Borneo, connectivity is increasingly threatened by deforestation, agricultural expansion, infrastructure development, and urbanization, leading to habitat fragmentation and isolation. This chapter examines the [...]
The Norfolk Island Proposal
Published: 2025-08-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
This paper proposes a novel ecological intervention: Ethical Marine Offal Dumping (EMOD) as a low-cost, high-impact method of restoring apex predator presence in marine ecosystems. Using Norfolk Island as a case study, where tiger sharks are significantly larger and more abundant than regional norms, the paper explores the unintended yet beneficial ecological consequences of routine livestock [...]
Comparing screening outcomes of national and global biodiversity datasets for private sector nature-related disclosures
Published: 2025-08-12
Subjects: Biodiversity
In response to demand for better biodiversity stewardship from the private sector, frameworks such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) have been developed to help companies assess, manage and disclose their nature-related impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities. A key initial screening step is to identify operations in ecologically sensitive areas, often done [...]
Eclipse of reason: debunking speculative anticipatory behavior in trees
Published: 2025-08-12
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Advancing plant behaviour research requires adherence to robust experimental designs, the formulation of alternative falsifiable hypotheses, sufficient replication, and stringent controls. These tenets safeguard the field from slipping into pseudoscience. A recent study by Chiolerio et al. (2025) claims that Picea abies trees collectively anticipate solar eclipses via electrome-based signalling. [...]
Rethinking termite methane emissions: does the mound environment matter?
Published: 2025-08-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Termites are important decomposers in tropical ecosystems, and they emit methane (CH4) from digesting plant matter. Termite contributions to global CH4 emissions are calculated using species-specific termite CH4 emissions from individuals (termite emission factors; TEF) and estimated biomass, which overlooks how the termite mound environment may alter emissions to the atmosphere. Factors such as [...]
Using Elicit AI research assistant for data extraction in systematic reviews: a feasibility study across environmental and life sciences
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Data extraction in systematic reviews, maps and meta-analyses is time-consuming and prone to human error or subjective judgment. Large Language Models offer potential for automating this process, yet their performance has been evaluated in a limited range of platforms, disciplines, and review types. We assessed the performance of the Elicit platform across diverse data extraction tasks using [...]
What we talk about when we talk about microbial species
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Genome annotation, alignment, and phylogenetics are at the center of most work in evolutionary genomics. These techniques function best when rooted in prior work. Genes are mined from new genomes using evidence from old gene models. These genomes are aligned to well-worn references to create matrices for tree reconstruction. And trees are often populated with well characterized genomes to add [...]
Strain-specific thermal acclimation, but little evidence of transgenerational plasticity, in an asexual crustacean
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Transgenerational plasticity has been suggested as a means for species to succeed in rapidly changing environments, such as increased temperature brought on by climate change. However, the evidence for this phenomenon in animals is mixed. The freshwater crustacean Daphnia magna displays transgenerational plasticity in response to environmental cues such as the presence of predators or food, but [...]
DualStack: Multi-Resolution Spectrogram Fusion Improves Bird Sound Classification for Ecological Monitoring
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Engineering
Automated bird sound classification plays a critical role in biodiversity assessment, ecological monitoring, and conservation research. Many current approaches use single-resolution spectrograms, which fail to fully capture the multi-scale acoustic features of avian vocalizations. We present DualStack, a new method that vertically stacks high-resolution and low-resolution Mel spectrograms into a [...]
Mitonuclear divergence predicts gradual speciation in animal hybrid zones
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
The core of speciation is the genetic incompatibilities underlying the evolution of reproductive isolation. Hybrid zones provide unique opportunities to unravel the evolutionary rate of reproductive isolation in the origin of species. The selection against hybrids accrues with increased genetic incompatibilities and drives the evolution of reproductive isolation in the face of gene flow. There [...]