Preprints
There are 2714 Preprints listed.
Identifying deforestation and defaunation fronts in Indonesia’s tropical forests
Published: 2025-11-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Tropical forests are central to global climate regulation and biodiversity conservation, yet continue to face intense pressure from agricultural expansion, resource extraction, and infrastructure development. Indonesia contains some of the world’s largest remaining tropical forests and exceptionally high vertebrate diversity, but its islands differ widely in both historic forest loss and emerging [...]
Taxonomic revisions, strategic decisions research and management priorities for the threatened greater glider complex
Published: 2025-11-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Collating and synthesising ecological information is critical for guiding effective conservation policy and management plans. This is especially pertinent for species of conservation concern. This task may be further complicated when taxonomic revisions of species and species complexes occur. Species previously managed as a single taxon may be reclassified into multiple species, and hence [...]
Another brick in the wall of European subterranean spider knowledge: adding Macaronesian species and their traits to the picture
Published: 2025-11-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Caves and other subterranean ecosystems impose highly selective environmental filters, driving the evolution of convergent and specialized traits in subterranean organisms. Here, we present the first comprehensive checklist and trait database for subterranean spiders of Macaronesia, thereby filling a significant knowledge gap relative to continental Europe. We compiled data through direct [...]
The ecology of resting behaviour in terrestrial vertebrates, and potential effects of anthropization
Published: 2025-11-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Inactive behaviours are a major component of animals’ lives, generally representing important proportions of time budgets. The conditions in which they occur are thus likely to have key effects on individual fitness. Yet, relatively little research has focused on the determinants and ecological consequences of inactive behaviours, likely in part because of the inherent difficulties associated [...]
Artificial light at night has life stage-specific effects on biological rhythms in a specialist insect
Published: 2025-11-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) has infiltrated many once-dark nightscapes, introducing a novel cue on biological clocks. Recent research has uncovered effects of ALAN on behavior, physiology, and fitness across taxa. However, questions remain about ALAN’s effects on key biological rhythm functions like diapause and sleep, and how disruptions to these rhythms can be linked to fitness declines. [...]
Proportion of native plants is a key predictor of pollinator richness in urban greenspaces
Published: 2025-11-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Pollinator declines are caused by a multitude of factors including pollution, global warming, disease, urbanization, deforestation, and habitat loss. Given the global increase in urbanization, identifying ways to support pollinators in cities has become an important conservation priority. Here, we investigate the effect of urbanization on pollinator richness. Using >100,000 iNaturalist [...]
A conceptual guide to studying multilevel societies
Published: 2025-11-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Multilevel societies—social systems composed of multiple nested social units—have long intrigued scholars in anthropology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology. Classically described in mammals, new evidence shows that multilevel societies are more widespread across taxa than previously acknowledged, raising both conceptual and methodological challenges for comparative research. 2. We [...]
Recolonisation dynamics of grey wolves: delayed recovery in a Central European country
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Population Biology, Zoology
Grey wolves have been recovering throughout Europe over the last decades, widely portrayed as a conservation success story. We evaluated the trends and demography of two wolf populations that recolonised the Czech Republic between 2011/2012 and 2022/2023, integrating a variety of fieldwork and laboratory methods including snow tracking, camera trapping, telemetry and non-invasive genetics, with [...]
Climate change increases the distribution of reservoirs of the Raccoon Rabies Virus in Quebec
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Zoonoses often emerge in environments where human-animal interactions intensify. In Québec, climate change and land use alterations are suspected drivers in the shifts of the potential distribution of urban-adapted hosts such as raccoons (Procyon lotor) and striped skunks (Mephitis mephitis), which serve as reservoirs for Raccoon Rabies Virus (RRV; a variant of Lyssavirus rabies). We used species [...]
TwisstNTern 2: Ternary analysis of topology weights from tree sequences
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Recent advances in genealogical inference now allow the reconstruction of genome-wide sequences of trees for large sets of samples, providing detailed records of how evolutionary relationships vary along the genome. Tree sequences encode a vast amount of information, but new approaches are needed to extract relevant patterns and make inferences. TwisstNtern is a program for visualising and [...]
How much monitoring is needed to reliably track progress towards genetic diversity targets?
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Population Biology
Achieving global biodiversity targets hinges on indicators of biodiversity change that convert raw data into reliable numbers that can shape policy, conservation, management, and, ultimately, the future of biodiversity worldwide. Indicators can only be used confidently if they detect and summarise biodiversity trends as intended, given the available data worldwide. Knowing whether indicators can [...]
High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza in Pinniped Conservation
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Since 2020, H5Nx highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses (HPAIVs) have caused widespread disruptions not only to global agriculture and trade but also to the health of free-ranging wildlife. Pinnipeds have experienced greater mortality from H5Nx HPAIV than any other mammalian taxa. Emergent virus strains, persisting over long time periods and vast geographic distances, have repeatedly triggered [...]
Emerging Applications of Large Language Models in Ecology and Conservation Science
Published: 2025-11-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) marks a major development in artificial intelligence, with potentially transformative implications for ecology and conservation science. Built on advanced deep-learning architectures, these models can support a wide range of tasks, from analysing unstructured texts to enhancing biodiversity monitoring and generating policy-relevant insights. This [...]
A century of invertebrate range extensions in the eastern North Pacific
Published: 2025-11-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aim Understanding the fundamental drivers of species’ range edges has been a core question in ecology and biogeography for centuries and has taken on new urgency in the Anthropocene. Yet range edges can rapidly shift over large distances, complicating long-term study of their dynamics. This is especially true in marine systems, where ranges may move hundreds of kilometers from one year to the [...]
The statistical fragility of animal cognition findings: a meta-meta-analytic reappraisal
Published: 2025-11-06
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Comparative Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Psychology
How reliable is the evidence in animal cognition research? Concerns are mounting over the statistical robustness of this and other fields. Many primary studies rely on small samples and rarely report null results, while meta-analyses sometimes overlook publication bias, all of which may contribute to unreliable conclusions. We conducted a second-order meta-analysis across 28 published [...]