Preprints
There are 2528 Preprints listed.
Democratizing 3D ecology: Mobile neural radiance field for scalable ecosystem mapping in change detection
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
High-resolution 3D monitoring is vital for understanding ecological dynamics, but methods like terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) are limited by cost and accessibility. We demonstrate that mobile neural radiance fields (NeRF), using consumer smartphones and open-source platforms, can produce vegetation reconstructions comparable to TLS in open environments, though performance decreases under dense [...]
Demographic causes of the pesticide crash in the peregrine falcon
Published: 2025-06-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Population crashes in many avian predators during the 1950–70s, caused by organochlorine pesticides, belong to the most spectacular cases in the history of conservation and ecotoxicology. Negative effects of DDT on eggshell thickness, leading to egg breakage and declining productivity, are well-documented. In addition, cyclodiene pesticides such as Dieldrin were strongly suspected to contribute [...]
Hotspots, refuges, and rising risk: mapping tropical hunting pressure across space and time
Published: 2025-06-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Hunting is a major driver of global extinctions, yet the spatial footprint and temporal trend of this pressure is lacking at global scale, limiting our ability to achieve international policy targets. Here, we present the first standardized global maps of hunting pressure across the tropics, based on a machine learning algorithm trained on 2,463 hunted and non-hunted tropical sites, spatially and [...]
Rethinking Stress Through an Ecological Genomic Lens: From Predatory Pressures to Modern Mismatch
Published: 2025-06-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Stress, traditionally seen as a psychological issue with physiological conse- quences, is now viewed as part of an evolutionary continuum. While modern stressors have shifted from immediate threats to chronic psychosocial chal- lenges, our physiological responses remain the same. In contrast, stress in the wild is acute; today’s chronic stressors keep the body in a prolonged fight- or-flight [...]
Time to publish ethically: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology.
Published: 2025-06-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
The scientific publishing market is dysfunctional: academia pays a lot for publishing, much more than the actual cost. Transitioning to ethical publishing is a collective challenge requiring to inform scientists about the problem and its potential solutions. We introduce DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology (https://dafnee.isem-evolution.fr/). [...]
Assessment of environmental and public health impacts of dog parks in residential neighborhoods: A case study in Toronto, Canada
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Public Health
The number of pet dogs has been increasing over the last decade, causing more challenges for dog owners taking care of their pets, particularly in current small apartments, as well as larger impacts on public health and environment. Dog owners usually use outdoor public spaces for their dogs to play and defecate. Public spaces are common sites of dog fecal contamination with prevalent rates of [...]
Prompting large language models for quality ecological statistics
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming scientific workflows, including statistical analyses in ecological sciences. While these AI tools offer impressive capabilities for code generation and analytical guidance, evaluations reveal significant limitations in their reasoning for standard statistical tests. Ecological statistics typically require special consideration due to spatial [...]
Allometry and shared ancestry, rather than ecology, shapes the evolution of 3D eye size in temperate butterflies
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Sensory traits shape animal lifestyles due to the central role they play in retrieving and processing environmental information. However, being some of the most energetically expensive tissues to build and maintain, ecological demands often modulate investment in these organs. Evidence that ecology shapes the evolution of sensory traits is plenty but is heavily biased towards vertebrates and has [...]
Social interactions shape anaerobic, but not aerotolerant, gut microbiome composition in a cooperative breeding species
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Ornithology
Background Social transmission of microbes has profound impacts on disease epidemiology and host health. However, how social factors influence gut microbiome (GM) transmission in wild populations is not well understood. Here, we use a wild population of the Seychelles warbler, a facultative cooperatively breeding passerine, to determine whether cooperative breeding behaviour influences the GM. [...]
Female driven reduction of sexual dimorphism in hominins
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Sexual dimorphism is a key indicator of social structure and selective pressures in primate evolution, yet its evolutionary drivers in hominins remain contentious. Here, we combine cutting edge dimorphism estimation methods, with Bayesian phylogenetic comparative analyses to disentangle the sex-specific contributions and evolutionary dynamics underlying changes in body mass and canine size across [...]
A practical guide to species trend detection with unstructured data using local frequency scaling (Frescalo)
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Accurately measuring biodiversity change remains a central challenge in ecology. Beyond the general idea of detection frameworks, which can help to estimate species trends under variable effort, other sampling-related biases in data collection remain a key challenge. Long-term standardized ecological data are rare, and most available datasets exhibit considerable spatial and temporal variation [...]
Biochemical oxygen demand as a proxy for dissolved organic carbon in Japanese rivers: Conservative estimates for ecological risk assessment
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Engineering, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health
Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is a critical parameter for assessing metal bioavailability and toxicity in aquatic systems, but data from routine measurements in Japan are limited to specific sites. The goal of this study was to develop a statistical model to estimate DOC concentrations in Japanese rivers using biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) as a proxy. Because the relationship between BOD and [...]
Free-ranging dogs in the streets: foreseeing a multispecies coexistence crisis beyond shortsighted kindness or conflicts
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Coexistence solutions tout conflict mitigation goals for commensals and wildlife, often ignoring the lived multispecies entanglements. Tropical cities have become battlegrounds of misguided kindness and escalating conflicts with animals. Human niche expansion creates a paradox for free-ranging denizens: abundant food sources from waste, yet unprecedented ecological pressures from infrastructural [...]
Ground-nesting ants as architects of microbial landscapes
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences
As soil ecosystem engineers, ground-nesting ants alter various physicochemical properties of soils globally. However, less is known about how ant behaviors including bioturbation and hygiene affect microbial communities, such as by altering habitat complexity, resource availability, and competitive dynamics. Interactions such as this are increasingly recognized as important components in shaping [...]
Conservation impacts and socio-demographic characteristics mediate perceptions of trophy hunting
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Trophy hunting is a divisive topic in conservation, with recent events and policy proposals reigniting heated debates over its acceptability. To understand what shapes divergent opinions on trophy hunting, we conducted an opportunistic survey that gauged the degree to which the perceived acceptability of trophy hunting was influenced by a range of contextual factors (e.g. animal welfare, [...]