Preprints
There are 2667 Preprints listed.
Forest composition and diversity buffer microclimates and enhance productivity
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Trees can buffer forest ecosystems against climate extremes, creating microenvironments that support diverse plant communities. We asked how diverse tree communities could influence the above- and below-ground moisture environment, thereby linking tree diversity and ecosystem function. To address this question, we integrated remotely sensed forest structure, growth inventories, microclimate [...]
Enhancing motivation to learn marine ecology and increase ocean literacy through Virtual Reality in Higher Education
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly recognised as a tool for enhancing engagement and motivation in education. This is particularly true where access to experiential learning is limited, as is often the case in marine ecology courses. However, the effectiveness of VR for teaching and learning in higher education is poorly understood. Here, we use the Explore experience developed by The Hydrous [...]
Elevating the importance of Risk of Bias assessment for ecology and evolution
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are key evidence synthesis methods informing research and policy. An assessment of the Risk of Bias (RoB) in included studies is normally considered an essential component of these. However, RoB assessment is rare in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), and tools from other fields are seldom adopted. To identify reasons for this limited uptake, we surveyed [...]
Comparing statistical methods for detecting weather cues of mast seeding in European beech (Fagus sylvatica) across Europe
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Understanding the drivers of mast seeding is important for predicting reproductive dynamics in perennial plants. Here, we evaluate the performance of four statistical methods for identifying weather-associated drivers of annual seed production, i.e, weather cues: climate sensitivity profile, P-spline regression, sliding window analysis, and peak signal detection. Using long-term seed production [...]
Avifaunal diversity in urban parks of Delhi is shaped by both anthropogenic and natural factors
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Urbanization leads to fragmentation and reduction of natural habitats which become islands of remnant biodiversity. As predicted by the Theory of Island Biogeography (TIB), fragment area and fragment isolation are major predictors of bird species richness in urban and rural habitats. This study is to understand patterns in avifaunal composition in select urban parks specifically in terms of area [...]
Characterising the structural complexity across major habitats of Tenerife, Spain
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences
Understanding biodiversity changes across ecosystems requires the consideration of various biodiversity dimensions, such as habitat structural complexity – the degree of heterogeneity in the distribution of plant material in three-dimensional space. Yet, its inclusion in long-term biodiversity monitoring on oceanic islands remains limited. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can be used to quantify [...]
Toxin resistance mechanisms span biological scales in the Royal Ground Snake (Colubridae: Erythrolamprus reginae)
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Molecular Biology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Systems Biology, Zoology
Exposure to multiple toxic compounds imposes selective pressures across biological levels. There are several known toxin resistance mechanisms–such as behavioral avoidance, metabolic detoxification, and target-site insensitivity but an integrative approach to consider multiple toxins and resistance strategies. Predators of amphibians, for example, must counteract multiple chemicals secreted by [...]
Genomic data confirms that mutation cannot restore genetic diversity lost through population bottlenecks
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Population Biology
Maintaining within-species genetic diversity is a critical goal of biodiversity conservation as it determines a species’ ability to adapt to environmental change. Without human intervention, isolated populations can only recover genetic diversity post-bottleneck through the accumulation of new mutations over evolutionary timescales. Using recent estimates of mutation rates from major genomic [...]
Historical and Potential Future Importance of Marine Megafauna Subsidies to Terrestrial Ecosystems
Published: 2025-06-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Marine megafauna exert tremendous influence on the structure and function of ocean ecosystems, yet mounting evidence shows that their ecological impacts also cross the land-sea interface and modify terrestrial ecosystem dynamics. Marine megafauna connect land and sea by serving as large, calorically-rich food sources for terrestrial consumers and by transferring marine-derived nutrients onto land [...]
When homology fails: lessons from liver-fluke phylogenies
Published: 2025-06-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Misaligned sequences derail evolutionary inference. Datasets from GenBank require verification of positional homology and orientation before alignment and phylogenetic analysis. Liver-fluke case studies reveal how overlooked errors skew results, underscoring the need for rigorous checks in parasitology and all molecular research.
Mapping disturbance across California’s rapidly changing forests
Published: 2025-06-12
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
Disturbances shape assemblages and spatial patterns of flora and fauna across the globe, and accurate disturbance mapping can aid conservation science and decision-making. However, mapping and differentiating among disturbance types using remote sensing is challenging, especially in forests with hidden subcanopy disturbances. On federal lands in the western US, wildfire, drought, and fuels [...]
National-scale datasets systematically underestimate vegetation recovery in Australian carbon farming projects
Published: 2025-06-11
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring
Limiting global warming below 2C requires nature-based climate solutions which are expected to supply more than a third of cost-effective climate mitigation by 2030, while prioritising avoiding fossil fuel emissions. Regenerating native forests under the Australian Government’s Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) program are delivering large-scale carbon storage across approximately 3.4 million [...]
Non-native grass invasion drives biodiversity loss after a single fire in a semi-arid shrubland
Published: 2025-06-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Desert Ecology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
In the United States Great Basin, invasive annual grasses have initiated a novel grass-fire cycle that has transformed vast areas of semi-arid shrublands into non-native annual grasslands that now burn frequently. After the initial transformation, the system is so fire prone that it is difficult to find areas that have not burned repeatedly. We evaluated how the ecosystem responds in the absence [...]
A draft genome assembly for the dart-poison frog Phyllobates terribilis
Published: 2025-06-10
Subjects: Biology, Genomics
Dendrobatid poison frogs have become well established as model systems in several fields of biology. Nevertheless, the development of molecular and genetic resources for these frogs has been hindered by their large, highly repetitive genomes, which have proven difficult to assemble. Here we present a draft assembly for Phyllobates terribilis (12.6Gb), generated using a combination of sequencing [...]
Marine Conservation Leadership: Does Australia Walk the Talk?
Published: 2025-06-10
Subjects: Natural Resources and Conservation
The conservation of Australia's extraordinary marine biodiversity has been prominently championed over the past three decades by successive Federal and State Governments, who have consistently portrayed the nation as a global leader in marine protection. Here, we question whether this reputation is justified. We highlight substantial—and in some cases catastrophic—declines in marine species and [...]