Preprints
There are 2749 Preprints listed.
Long-read sequencing for biodiversity analyses - a comprehensive guide
Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
DNA-based monitoring of biodiversity has revolutionised our ability to describe communities and rapidly assess anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. Currently established molecular methods for biomonitoring rely heavily on classic metabarcoding utilising short reads, mostly through Illumina data. However, increasingly more studies use long-read sequencing technologies, such as Oxford Nanopore [...]
Fast evolving flowers drive cactus diversification
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The rise of biodiversity is shaped by variation in diversification rates. Across the Tree of Life, numerous forces are thought to influence these rates, including the evolution of adaptive traits, climate change, and interactions with other organisms. In the flowering plants, a longstanding hypothesis favoured by Darwin suggests that floral evolution is a driving force for plant diversity. [...]
Social and economic consequences of prestige and dominance in rural Colombian social networks
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Social status regulates influence and well-being in most social-animals. In humans, social status can be attained via two distinct routes: prestige (freely-conferred deference, typically tracking the ability of individuals to confer benefits) and dominance (fear-based deference, typically tracking the ability of individuals to inflict costs). While prestige and dominance are well-studied from a [...]
Genomic characteristics of root-knot nematodes: a major group of crop pests
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Nematodes constitute one of the most species-rich groups of animals, only paralleled by arthropods. They have a worldwide distribution being present in many biomes from deep sea sediments to deserts. Around 15% of them parasitize plants and they cause enormous damage to the global agricultural production despite the control methods deployed. Among those, the root-knot nematodes (genus [...]
Herbarium specimens reveal long-term decline in pollination services since in the 1970s
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Anthropogenic change has resulted in pollinator decline and altered plant-pollinator interactions. This may drive widespread declines in pollination and reproductive success of plants, yet few datasets allow us to track changes in pollination services over time. Herbaria provide a unique opportunity to assess pollination services across broad spatial and temporal scales, and the associated [...]
Observation methods in animal behaviour: a simulation study of performance
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biological Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Most behavioural studies rely on systematic samples of behaviour, as observing and recording all behavioural events that occur is rarely feasible. Choosing an observation method involves several key decisions, including which individuals to observe, how to sample their behaviour, and how to distribute sampling effort over time. These decisions influence how closely behavioural estimates reflect [...]
Sydney Phylogenetics Workshop: Lessons from the past 15 years
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phylogenetic analysis forms an important component of research in the life sciences, enabling the study of evolutionary relationships, timescales, patterns, and processes. Phylogenetic trees are used in a wide variety of research fields, including molecular ecology, taxonomy and systematics, conservation genetics, and microbiology. Accordingly, there is a strong demand for accessible training in [...]
Changes in pollen production, pollen heteromorphism and ovule production with increased selfing in Viola arvensis
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Plant Biology, Population Biology
Embryos are largely understudied in conservation physiology
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology
Understanding how animals respond to environmental stressors across their life cycle is essential for predicting species’ vulnerability to climate change. Here, we systematically reviewed the literature to quantify the variation in research effort on different life stages in the field of conservation physiology. Specifically, we reviewed experimental studies measuring physiological and [...]
Pleiotropy and the evolutionary stability of plastic phenotypes: a geometric framework
Published: 2025-08-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Phenotypic plasticity allows organisms to express different traits in response to different environmental or genetic conditions. Understanding the evolution of conditional phenotypes is challenging because they are not expressed by all members of a population, which allows for the accumulation of deleterious variation due to drift. Theory suggests pleiotropic effects help prevent the decay of [...]
Moving from the Dilution Effect to Dilution Landscapes: Effects of Natural Vegetation Cover and Fragmentation on Host-parasite Eco-evolutionary Dynamics
Published: 2025-08-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The conversion and fragmentation of natural landscapes are key drivers of biodiversity loss and the erosion of ecosystem services, including disease regulation. Although habitat degradation is linked to higher zoonotic disease risk, the mechanisms by which landscape structure shapes host-parasite eco-evolutionary dynamics remain poorly understood. Here, we combine a spatially explicit [...]
Catalogue of Papilionoidea from Noguera de Albarracín (Teruel, Spain), including new distributional data for the Sierra de Albarracín (Insecta: Lepidoptera)
Published: 2025-08-20
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Zoology
We present a catalogue of butterflies from Noguera de Albarracín (Teruel, Spain), based on field surveys conducted in 2024 and 2025 within the framework of the Iberozoa Entomology Course. A total of 52 species were recorded, representing 20.15% of the Iberian butterfly fauna. The material belongs to 5 families, 13 subfamilies, 33 genera and 52 species. Lycaenidae was the richest family with 16 [...]
An Exact Coarse-Graining Consistent Metapopulation Model
Published: 2025-08-20
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Different levels of coarse-graining are of paramount importance to understand how conclusions drawn from local studies can be made general and extrapolated to larger regions. We here investigate how consist metapopulation model are when considering different resolutions of the landscape matrix, i.e. different levels of coarse-graining. A formulation of the metapopulation model, taking into [...]
Causal interpretations can be based on mechanistic knowledge
Published: 2025-08-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. There exists a long-standing disconnect between statistical and mechanistic approaches to the development of causal understanding. Statistical approaches, which have dominated the literature, have focused on the need to obtain perfectly unbiased estimates of causal effects often using either experimental, quasi-experimental, or other methods. Mechanistic approaches have instead focused on [...]
Finding Inter-species Associations on Large Citizen Science Datasets
Published: 2025-08-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences