Preprints
There are 3850 Preprints listed.
Beyond static species distribution models: temporally dynamic, spatially nested models reduce extrapolation for future projections
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology
Species distribution models are widely used to project biodiversity responses to climate change, but geographically restricted training data can truncate species’ climatic niches, increasing reliance on extrapolation. Spatially nested models can reduce this truncation by incorporating climatic information from species’ wider distributions. However, how accounting for interannual environmental [...]
SORTEE five years on: taking stock of the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary biology
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In five years, the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE) has grown from a small network of like-minded researchers into a grassroots, international community. Founded in late 2020, SORTEE works to make ecology and evolutionary biology more open, reliable, and transparent at a time when prevailing incentives in academia often reward novelty and [...]
Teaching dynamical systems modeling, analysis and simulation using a Lotka-Volterra Predation Narrative and a Numerus WebKit App
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Lotka-Volterra prey-predator (LVPP) equations are among the few ecological models that have become a standard part of the undergraduate mathematics curriculum. Rather than looking elsewhere for fresh examples, we use this familiar story as a single narrative thread along which the toolkit of dynamical systems analysis and simulation is introduced, one modeling assumption at a time. Five [...]
Human-mediated community assembly reshapes urban phytochemical diversity
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Sciences
Human activities increasingly determine which plant species coexist, particularly in cities, yet whether this reshapes the chemical dimension of biodiversity remains largely unknown. Here, we investigated how human-mediated plant community assembly influences phytochemical diversity by integrating community composition, functional traits, phylogenetic relationships, leaf metabolomes, and floral [...]
Heathland above-ground biomass estimation using UAV and LiDAR
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Heathland is an important carbon sink and habitat for biodiversity. It is heavily managed Heathland is an important carbon sink and habitat for biodiversity. It is heavily managed through grazing and prescribed fire and faces increasing threats from wildfire and forest encroachment. Because the proportion of overall heathland carbon stock is predominately below-ground, above-ground biomass [...]
Abrupt reproductive responses to weather and shifting climatic signals across thermal contexts in trees
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Plant Sciences
Large inter-annual variation in tree seed production is widespread and closely linked to weather. Yet, we know little about the shape of these relationships, their dependence on resources, or their spatial consistency. We fitted boosted regression trees (eight species; 6,491 population-level observations; 352 sites), using prior seeding as proxy for resource status. Predictive performance ranged [...]
As open as possible, as protected as necessary: Proportionate governance for environmental DNA under the BBNJ Agreement
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Environmental Law, Marine Biology, Molecular Genetics
The Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement) establishes new arrangements for activities involving marine genetic resources and the sharing of resulting benefits. Direct pathways to resource utilisation are most apparent in conventional genetic workflows where whole organisms or tissues are collected [...]
The e14 cryptic prophage belongs to a temperate phage lineage distributed across Escherichia and retains genes with potential anti-phage defence functions
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Bacteriology, Bioinformatics, Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Microbiology
The e14 region of Escherichia coli str. K-12 is a cryptic prophage that retains functional excision and integration machinery despite extensive loss of phage reproductive functions. However, its evolutionary relationship to other bacteriophages remains poorly resolved. Here, we identify related prophages across four Escherichia species, alongside related, independently isolated bacteriophages. [...]
Hydrodynamic Feedbacks in Coral Reefs: from Organisms to Geomorphic Development
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Coral reefs are shaped by tightly coupled interactions among geomorphology, hydrodynamic forcing, and ecological processes. In this review, we synthesize current knowledge on how hydrodynamic processes regulate coral reef functioning across scales, from exchanges at organismal surfaces to reef-scale morphodynamics. Hydrodynamic forcing governs mass and momentum transfer across scales through [...]
Where the fluke meets the snail: climate, ensemble models, and fasciolosis risk in Ukraine
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fasciolosis, caused by the liver fluke Fasciola hepatica, is an economically important zoonotic disease that is endemic in Ukraine, yet the environmental drivers of its distribution remain insufficiently understood and no national-scale risk model has been produced. We compiled occurrence records for F. hepatica and its intermediate snail host Galba truncatula and used an ensemble species [...]
Gaps and biases in the ecological evidence underlying global biodiversity impact assessments
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1. Halting global biodiversity loss requires methods that link biodiversity impacts to both their direct drivers and the human activities that generate them. Biodiversity footprint assessment has emerged as a key framework for establishing these connections, resulting in the rapid development of diverse methods and applications. Central to these approaches are characterisation factors (CFs), [...]
Size-dependent beak shape divergence between Parrot and Common Crossbills likely involves major developmental changes
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Forest Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Zoology
We studied allometry, here defined as shape-size covariation, to explore the unresolved case of divergence between the Parrot and Common Crossbill. Using geometric morphometrics, we compared beak shape and allometry among the Parrot Crossbill, the Common Crossbill and the more distantly related Two-Barred Crossbill. The Parrot Crossbill differed from the two other species in shape changes that [...]
Gaussian processes on phylogenies: a kernel framework for building, checking and comparing models of trait evolution
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Phylogenetic comparative methods for continuous traits, such as phylogenetic generalised least squares, Brownian motion and Ornstein–Uhlenbeck models, Pagel's tree transformations, early-burst and multi-rate models, phylogenetic mixed models and ancestral-state reconstruction, can all be regarded as Gaussian processes on a phylogeny that differ only in their covariance function, or kernel. This [...]
Conspecific density enhances sound seed production during high-seed years in European beech
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is reducing the supply of sound seeds available for forest regeneration, creating a need to identify management strategies that can counteract these losses. Managing local tree density offers one potential approach, as neighbouring trees can enhance pollination but also increase losses to seed predators. In masting species, which produce highly variable but synchronised seed crops, [...]
Vert-NSM: neural shape models for shape completion, classification, and landmark-free morphometrics of vertebrate specimens
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Biodiversity
Natural history museums are building digital 3D archives at a scale that enables geometric morphometric analysis across thousands of specimens. Landmark-based analyses depend on anatomical priors and often exclude unidentified and incomplete specimens, which are abundant in collections and the fossil record. Continuous shape representations offer a landmark-free alternative that can be combined [...]