Preprints
There are 2761 Preprints listed.
Physiological strategies explain mortality differences amongst ecologically and culturally significant Australian desert plants following a hotter drought
Published: 2025-11-28
Subjects: Plant Biology
Climate change-induced drought and heatwave events (hotter droughts) are causing mass plant dieback events globally. Recently, Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (UKTNP) in central Australia saw a widespread plant dieback (mortality) event, resulting in negative impacts to the ecosystems and concern and a desire to understand more about the underlying causes of mass plant death from Anangu [...]
Modelling the current and future potential distribution areas of Columba albitorques in Ethiopia
Published: 2025-11-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding species’ responses to climate change is essential for predicting future biodiversity patterns and informing conservation strategies. However, in Ethiopia, the impacts of climate change on bird distributions remain poorly documented. This study utilized the MaxEnt model to predict the current and future distribution of the White-collared Pigeon (Columba albitorques) under different [...]
Meeting the Demand: Aligning Marine Biodiversity Data Supply with Policy Needs
Published: 2025-11-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
The effective implementation of international, regional, and national commitments on marine biodiversity depends on reliable data. However, there is often a disconnect between the information generated by scientists and the data explicitly required by policy processes. This review systematically examined more than thirty policy instruments and mapped over 1,000 explicit data requirements to [...]
Adaptive introgression in the context of climate adaptation
Published: 2025-11-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics
As the biosphere faces accelerating environmental disruption, including climate change, and the prospect of an anthropogenically-driven mass extinction, understanding the mechanisms that enable species to adapt has become increasingly urgent. One mechanism attracting growing attention is adaptive introgression, the transfer of beneficial genetic variation between closely related species. Although [...]
Resilience and function: Beetles as critical drivers of global ecological processes
Published: 2025-11-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Beetles (Coleoptera), among the most diverse and ecologically significant insect groups, play vital roles in ecosystem functioning and service provision. With over 300,000 described species, their adaptability - driven by traits such as elytra and diverse feeding habits enables them to occupy nearly all terrestrial niches. Beetles contribute to nutrient cycling, pollination, seed dispersal, pest [...]
From mating to sperm storage: density-dependent plasticity in pre- and post-copulatory shared mating traits
Published: 2025-11-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mating interactions depend on traits expressed jointly by males and females, yet the extent to which each sex controls variation in these shared mating traits remains unclear. Because the expression of such traits (like mating latency, copulation duration, and sperm transfer) depends on both partners, their evolution is constrained by intersexual correlations yet facilitated by behavioural [...]
Ecosystem services from shellfish reefs as a nature-based solution: a global evidence synthesis to guide restoration and policy
Published: 2025-11-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Context. Shellfish reefs, comprising oysters, mussels, clams, and mixed bivalves, act as ecosystem engineers and nature-based solutions (NbS), providing supporting, regulating, provisioning, and cultural ecosystem services (ES). Yet, despite rapid growth in restoration practice, the translation of ES evidence into policy and management remains uneven across regions and taxa. 2. Objectives. We [...]
Quantifying Energy-Efficient Evolution in Cursorial Avian Archosaurs Through Comparative Torque-Based Hindlimb Modeling
Published: 2025-11-27
Subjects: Evolution, Paleobiology
Understanding the way evolution drives adaptations that “optimize” energy-efficiency in cursorial species provides instrumental insights into both biomechanical and bio-inspired engineering fields. This study quantitatively models the cursorial evolution of energy-efficient locomotion in bird-line archosaurs by comparing the hindlimb mechanics of Deinonychus antirrhopus (extinct theropod) and [...]
Quantifying impacts of policy and practice interventions on biodiversity and climate
Published: 2025-11-27
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
There is urgent demand for ecosystem management interventions – targeted actions through policies and practices – that meaningfully address climate change and biodiversity loss while sustaining ecosystem delivery of water, food, fibre and fuel. Rigorous quantification of intervention outcomes is required for decision makers to identify, promote and scale effective interventions. Yet [...]
Forest fecundity declines as climate shifts
Published: 2025-11-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Tree fecundity underpins regeneration, range tracking, and seed supply for assisted migration, yet may decline as climates move beyond reproductive niches. Using 34 years of nationwide harvest records from Poland (40,530 observations across 438 forest districts) for five dominant taxa — oaks (Quercus robur, Q. petraea), European beech (Fagus sylvatica), Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris), and silver [...]
Marker-Assisted Breeding for Salt Tolerance in Rice: In Bangladesh Context.
Published: 2025-11-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Salinity stress threatens rice (Oryza sativa L.) production across 1.056 million hectares of Bangladesh's coastal regions, with intensification projected due to climate change and sea-level rise. Marker-assisted breeding (MAB) has emerged as a transformative approach for developing salt-tolerant varieties, offering precision and efficiency over conventional methods. This review examines [...]
Hemitaeniochromis pumba, a new species of cichlid fish from Lake Malawi, Africa, with comments on related species.
Published: 2025-11-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
A new species of haplochromine (Pseudocrenilabrini) cichlid fish, Hemitaeniochromis pumba is described from Lake Malawi, named for its outwardly angled, tusk-like oral jaw teeth, recalling those of a pig or warthog. It is assigned to the genus Hemitaeniochromis Eccles & Trewavas 1989 on the basis of its dark horizontal midlateral band, broken anteriorly but continuous posteriorly, with a [...]
Plasticity and scaling through multinucleation: a key adaptation to challenging environments
Published: 2025-11-26
Subjects: Cell and Developmental Biology, Cell Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Multinucleate cells, single cells containing multiple nuclei in a shared cytoplasm, are found across the eukaryotic tree of life. Having evolved independently in fungi, plants, protists, and animals, they thrive in environments ranging from nutrient-poor deep-sea sediments to dynamic soil microhabitats and host tissues. Multinucleate organization enables spatial specialization without internal [...]
Large regional variation in global impacts of agriculture on terrestrial insects and other arthropods
Published: 2025-11-26
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Many insects and other arthropods are reported to be in rapid decline worldwide, mainly driven by changes in land use and climate. At the same time, arthropods provide many important services that benefit agriculture, and thus their losses may pose risks to food security. Although biodiversity responses vary between global realms, this spatial heterogeneity is not well-understood and is rarely [...]
Unravelling the Enigma of Soil Animal Diversity: An Integrated Perspective from Functional Traits to Evolutionary History
Published: 2025-11-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Why does a single square meter of forest soil harbour thousands of animal species? Fifty years after Jonathan M. Anderson raised this question, soil ecology still struggles with a fragmented view on the coexistence of species. Researchers often study taxonomy, functional traits, and phylogeny in isolation. Each approach adds insight but leaves gaps in the picture of soil biodiversity. In this [...]