Preprints
There are 3503 Preprints listed.
Patterns of Gray Wolf and White-tailed Deer Movement: Local, County and Regional Camera-trap Data (2018-2025)
Published: 2026-07-31
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The gray wolf (Canis lupus) is the apex predator of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), but on a single restored site it can be too rare to study. A year-round survey of about ten cameras at nine fixed stations on an approximately 100-ha prairie–savanna complex located within Washburn County, Wisconsin, yielded too few wolf detections over three years (11,473 animal detections, 2024–2026) [...]
The Global Ecosystems Atlas: comprehensive and systematic mapping of Earth's ecosystems
Published: 2026-07-31
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geography, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Halting and reversing biodiversity loss is central to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, yet a lack of consistent, spatially comprehensive data on ecosystem distributions has undermined our ability to monitor progress against its goals and targets. Here we introduce the Global Ecosystems Atlas initiative, convened by the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO) in [...]
Age-related shifts in dietary and oviposition preferences and steep costs of modest parental ageing in Drosophila melanogaster
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Nutritional requirements vary across sexes and throughout an organism’s lifetime, and are predicted to influence dietary preferences to maximise fitness. However, the consequences of age-related changes in dietary preferences within and across generations are unknown. This is an important omission, as age-related changes in nutrient intake could have direct, sex-specific effects on offspring. We [...]
Biodiversity Externality Costs Through Supply Chain: A pass-Through Input-Output Framework for Biodiversity Financial Impact Assessment
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Studies, Other Economics
Transition biodiversity risk is increasingly recognised as a source of financial risk, yet no framework exists to translate firm-level biodiversity impacts into credit risk metrics comparable to those developed for climate transition risk or even biodiversity dependency risk. This paper fills that gap by adapting the cost pass-through input-output methodology, established in the climate [...]
Interspecific Bergmann’s rule pattern in birds persists despite seasonal migration
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Climatic gradients are thought to shape animal body size, with larger species often occurring in colder environments. Yet trait-climate relationships may reflect current climatic exposure as well as the evolutionary and biogeographic histories that shaped species’ traits. Bergmann’s rule illustrates this challenge, and birds provide a useful test because seasonal migration decouples body size [...]
Configuration coefficients can mislead conservation inference from beta diversity in fragmented landscapes
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Beta diversity informs reserve design and connectivity planning because compositional turnover links local assemblages to regional diversity. However, the conservation meaning of a beta-diversity pattern depends on the mechanism that generates it, not on the sign of a landscape-configuration coefficient alone. I use a recent Atlantic Forest tree beta-diversity analysis (Kramer et al. 2026, Global [...]
More trees, more moths: how urban treescapes can help reverse moth declines
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Moths are undergoing widespread declines in abundance, biomass and diversity, with consequences for pollination, herbivory and trophic interactions. Yet moth conservation remains poorly integrated into biodiversity policy and practice, particularly in urban environments. Here, we argue that trees offer an underused, but very timely, opportunity to support urban moth communities. Trees provide [...]
GLYPTEMYS INSCULPTA (Wood Turtle) PREDATION.
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Glyptemys insculpta is a semi-aquatic emydid turtle native to the midwestern and northeastern United States and eastern Canada. This species is imperiled across much of its range and is legally protected in all states and provinces where it occurs. In this report, we document G. insculpta egg predation by Peromyscus maniculatus bairdii (Prairie Deer Mouse), which occurred within a two-week period [...]
The emergence and persistence of partial migration
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Partial migration, where some individuals in a population migrate while others remain resident, is a widespread and complex behavioural phenomenon arising from the interplay of genetic, developmental, social, and environmental processes. These mechanisms often interact, as migratory strategies can be shaped by genetic variation, individual experience, social learning, and fluctuating [...]
The first successful use of a robot seed planter in seagrass restoration
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
The global decline of seagrass meadows has intensified efforts to restore these foundational coastal ecosystems, yet restoration remains constrained by the inability to deliver seeds consistently, accurately, and efficiently over ecologically meaningful spatial scales. While underwater robotics have increasingly been proposed to overcome these operational bottlenecks, there is currently little [...]
Nervous system centralization as the evolutionary scaffold for body segmentation: A review of the evidence
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics
The evolutionary origins of two major bilaterian innovations, the centralized nervous system and the segmented body plan, have both been debated as cases of homology versus convergence, often using strikingly similar arguments. Here we review the comparative developmental genetics of both processes across the three segmented animal phyla (arthropods, annelids, and chordates) focusing on the [...]
From village land use plans to Key Biodiversity Areas: unlocking Tanzania's hidden conservation potential
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
Tanzania's National Land Use Planning Commission holds a fast-growing statutory archive of Village Land Use Plans, with approximately 4,900 approved plans covering roughly 40 percent of the country's registered villages as of mid-2026. Each plan records land tenure, zoning, and natural resource management rules at the village level under the Village Land Act of 1999 and the Land Use Planning Act [...]
Climate Change Reveals Contrasting Vulnerability: Asymmetric Range Shifts of Two Dianthus Species in the Irano-Anatolian Biodiversity Hotspot
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The Irano-Anatolian biodiversity hotspot harbors exceptional plant richness and endemism but faces severe threats from climate change. We used MaxEnt-based ecological niche models to evaluate the current and future distributions of two closely related species, Dianthus floribundus and Dianthus szowitsianus. Models were projected for mid-century (2041–2070) and late-century (2071–2100) under [...]
The Capture Shift Hypothesis: Functional Decoupling of Capture and Feeding as a Framework for Coordinated Primate Evolution
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The evolutionary origin of defining primate characteristics has been explained through ecological, behavioral, and dietary hypotheses, yet a broader question remains: why did multiple traits evolve in a broadly coordinated manner? This study proposes the Capture Shift Hypothesis (CSH), a testable conceptual framework in which prey capture was progressively redistributed from the oral apparatus to [...]
Honey, I shrunk one of my gonads! Does ‘feminization’ of behaviour cause asymmetric testis development in coucals?
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
In most birds, females develop only a single ovary. This asymmetry is usually explained as an adaptation to reduce weight for flight, or to prevent damage to hard-shelled eggs by a second egg in the other oviduct. By contrast, males retain paired testes with the left one typically being larger. Coucals break this pattern: as sex-role reversal intensifies across the genus, males show a progressive [...]