Preprints
There are 3743 Preprints listed.
Toward a General Theory of Heteromorphic Reproduction
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Organisms often divide reproductive investment among outputs that differ in morphology, timing, or reproductive mechanism. In this paper I extend the minimum-risk treatment of seed heteromorphism to the more general question of organisms with ‘portfolios’ of biologically distinct reproductive outputs. The resulting framework specifies a common investment and fitness currency, calculates returns [...]
Genomic divergence between species identifies taxonomic outliers and establishes calibrated molecular clocks
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
For decades, molecular clocks that rely on one or a few genes have been employed to quantify evolutionary rates (e.g., anagenesis) or to help date important phylogeographic events (e.g., vicariance). Genome-wide clocks remain largely unexplored, and the degree to which genome-wide divergence scales with time is still unknown in most vertebrates. Here, we expand the concept of the molecular clock [...]
Wildlife Responses to a Resident a Family: A Three-Year Camera Census on Restored Prairie–Savanna (2024–2026)
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A steward-conducted trail-camera census on a restored prairie–savanna complex in Washburn County, Wisconsin, labeled every frame from ten cameras at nine fixed stations for 2024, 2025 and January–June 2026 (11,820 frames; 11,135 estimated wildlife individuals; 1,027 frames of the resident family). White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) made up 67–83% of wildlife individuals in each year. [...]
Wolf–Deer and Guild Camera-trap Detections Across Wisconsin’s Statewide Wolf Range (2018–2025), Resolved by Deer Class: Buck Selection in the Hard-Antler Season, Bears and Fawns, and Class-Specific Reference Values for Displacement
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A statewide analysis of wolf-enriched Snapshot Wisconsin camera data (Vraniak 2026d) reported four things: wolves following deer, a temporary rise in that following after the February 2021 wolf harvest, displacement of deer by wolves, and avoidance of people across five co-occurring species. All of it treated deer as a single class. This companion resolves the deer into antlered bucks, antlerless [...]
Reservoir, sink, or reactor? Repositioning marine sponges as candidate indicators for coastal antimicrobial resistance monitoring
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) spreads through the environment, and in coastal areas it is investigated mainly in water and sediment. These matrices capture antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) passing through them but may fail to retain that information over time because of the dynamics inherent in these ecosystems. Filter-feeding invertebrates are obvious candidates for the role, and bivalves [...]
Population density, cooperation, and the evolution of toothed whale societies
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences
Odontocete societies come in two primary forms: stable matrilineally-based groups, often with bonds between groups, and labile associations among related and unrelated females in a ‘fission-fusion’ grouping pattern. There is no general theory to explain why these differing strategies evolved. Primate models of social bond evolution, based on cooperation in food competition, lack utility for [...]
Modeling Decomposition: Beyond a Well-Mixed World
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Carbon cycle models overlook resource patchiness and networked foraging characterizing terrestrial carbon dynamics. They treat inputs as well mixed and decomposers as acting at local scales, making substrate stoichiometry, rather than spatial access, the primary constraint on decomposition. Using deadwood decomposition by cord-forming fungi and termites as examples, we illustrate how resource [...]
Common, consequential, and actively maintained: a neo-balance view of genetic variation
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A fundamental and still unfinished task of evolutionary biology is to understand the nature of genetic variation and the evolutionary forces that shape it. The traditional approach to this problem is through retrospective inference from patterns in contemporary, static DNA sequence data. The prevailing view that emerged from these studies and from theoretical research is that segregating genetic [...]
Evenness under incomplete sampling: coupled error channels, hidden compensation, and the richness-estimation bottleneck
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Normalized evenness combines an abundance-diversity functional with richness, so incomplete sampling acts through two coupled errors. For \(E_{\alpha,\beta}=L_\beta(D_\alpha)/L_\beta(S)\), the log-error decomposes exactly as \(T_\beta=U_\beta+V_\beta\). With observed richness, \(V_\beta\) is nonnegative whenever species are missed, but total error can have either sign. 2. We generated 950,100 [...]
Quantifying the probability of evolutionary rescue
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
While evolutionary rescue is now a well-established term, there are subtleties in precisely defining it and conceptual complications in quantifying its probability. In this Perspective, we pay special attention to three issues: 1) How do we know that a population would go extinct in the absence of evolution? 2) How do we determine the probability of rescue if persistence is possible in the [...]
Canyoning simplifies benthic macroinvertebrate communities in Mediterranean canyons: evidence from Sierra y Cañones de Guara Natural Park
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Recreational activities in freshwater ecosystems are increasing worldwide, yet their ecological consequences remain poorly understood. Canyoning is one of the most popular nature-based sports in Mediterranean rivers, but quantitative assessments of its effects on aquatic communities are scarce, particularly in protected areas where conservation and recreation coexist. Here, we evaluated how [...]
A synthesis of bird biodiversity studies in geographically isolated wetlands reveals research synergies and opportunities
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Geographically isolated wetlands represent integral foraging and breeding habitat for many bird species across the United States, yet few studies have attempted to synthesize existing research to quantify generalizable relationships between bird biodiversity and geographically isolated wetlands. We conduct a systematic review of bird biodiversity in geographically isolated wetlands of the [...]
Reconsidering interspecific co-occurrence of native and invasive plants in an anthropogenic riparian ecosystem
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Sciences
Invasive non-native plants are considered mostly though negative interactions, but are increasingly recognized as potential contributors to ecosystem functioning. By modifying microhabitats, resource availability and species interactions, non-natives plants may reshape and maintain the living conditions of native plant communities. We conducted an observational field study to quantify the [...]
TaxonBodyMassML: Taxonomy-informed prediction of body mass using gradient-boosted trees
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Body mass is a key ecological trait governing metabolic rates, life-history characteristics, interaction strengths, and community structure and dynamics. Despite its centrality to ecology and ecological modelling, direct body mass measurements exist for only a small fraction of all scientifically described species. 2. We present TaxonBodyMassML, a machine-learning tool to predict the body [...]
Patterns of wind dispersal within a forest canopy: An epiphyte perspective
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Plant dispersal theory has largely been developed from a terrestrial perspective, in which interception by vegetation is considered a loss, and success is defined by arrival at suitable ground-level habitat. True epiphytes—non-parasitic plants structurally dependent on a host throughout their lives—represent a striking reversal of this framework: their diaspores must be intercepted by suitable [...]