Preprints
There are 3494 Preprints listed.
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: 2026-07-29
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 [...]
Ensemble learning in ecological niche modeling of the Siderastrea (Cnidaria: Scleractinia) Atlantic complex: an information theory approach
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Ecological niche modeling (ENM) is an invaluable tool in biodiversity science and many algorithms were developed for or incorporated into this area over the years. Back in 2007, Araújo and New outlined a framework to integrate different sources of variation into robust model projections. Almost 20 years later, surveys of real world applications show that standards are still lacking, particularly [...]
Decoupling the dimensions of plant invasion success reveals divergent trait syndromes across invasion outcomes and growth forms
Published: 2026-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The number of invasive plant species and their impacts continue to increase globally, yet efforts to identify traits that reliably predict invasion success have produced inconsistent results. To address this challenge, we asked whether trait–invasion relationships vary across dimensions of invasion success and growth forms. Using 16 functional and niche traits for 622 invasive plant species [...]
Deep Learning for Combating Wildlife and Environmental Crime: A Survey
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Wildlife and Environmental Crime (WEC) describes illegal activities that threaten biodiversity and harm the environment. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has shown strong potential in combating WEC by learning complex patterns in data through the extraction of high-dimensional features. DL also offers powerful capabilities for prediction, classification, and object tracking, and has become an [...]
Centuries of provenance trials: towards predictive infrastructures for forest adaptation under climate change
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences
Provenance trials are among forestry's most valuable experimental legacies. Established over centuries to compare species and provenances, they laid the foundation for understanding local adaptation and supported tree breeding, but remained focused on growth, timber quality, and ranking provenances by performance. Climate change calls for a next generation of comparative trials that can help [...]
Nutrient Stress and Coral Health: Bridging Physiology, Holobiont Dynamics, and Molecular Mechanisms
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Nutrient stress acts as a multiscalar and context-dependent driver of coral reef decline primarily driven by anthropogenic interference. Decades of physiological and ecological studies have established that nutrient stress elicits physiological responses from corals, but reveal species-specific variability dependent on nutrient identity, concentration, and stoichiometry, as well as intricate [...]
varKodes extend DNA barcoding to ultrafine-grained identity, place, and state
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
DNA barcoding has transformed biodiversity science, but locus-based markers often fail across taxa, at shallow phylogenetic depths, and in mixed or spatially structured samples. Here, we test whether varKoder, an alignment-free framework that converts low-coverage genomic reads into image-based genomic signatures (varKodes), can extend barcoding from taxonomic identification to broader inference [...]
Species Traits Predict Local Population Change Above and Beyond Regional Trend
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Why do some populations persist in the face of environmental change while others decline? We tested the extent to which variation in local population change across species is attributable to three species traits: (i) habitat selectivity, (ii) temperature niche position, and (iii) degree of insectivory, with the null hypothesis that local trends are simply a reflection of broader regional trends. [...]
From open science to credible science: practical guidance for more transparent and robust causal claims in ecology and conservation
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Rigorous scientific evidence requires both “transparency in action” about the research process and “transparency in thought” about the assumptions and logic underlying decisions. The open science movement has emphasized transparency in action, including open data and code standards. In parallel, causal inference literature has emphasized transparency in thought, particularly around the [...]
Fire regime assumptions can drastically influence pyrodiversity-biodiversity relationships in heterogeneous forest landscapes
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Management, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Background. Higher spatio-temporal variation in fire regime attributes in fire-dominated landscapes (pyrodiversity) is thought to promote higher levels of biodiversity – the pyrodiversity-biodiversity hypothesis – yet this effect likely varies across taxa and systems. As a result, ecosystem-based management in heterogenous, fire-dominated forests requires understanding the strength and shape of [...]