Preprints
There are 2380 Preprints listed.
Mapping Cheatgrass Along California’s Roadways and Powerlines to Identify High-Risk Ignition Zones
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Climate, Computational Engineering
Between 2001 and 2023, wildfires in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) caused by power lines, vehicles, and equipment accounted for approximately 23% of the total area burned by identified ignition sources, burning an estimated 3 million acres in California alone. These ignition sources have been major contributors to the destruction of infrastructure, loss of life, and air pollution in WUI [...]
Attentional Control and Vertebrate Cognitive Evolution
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology
How might brain functioning differ between endotherm and ectotherm vertebrates? Recent results suggest that ectotherms lack proper working memory, which could reflect a lack of attentional control. Ectotherms may nevertheless excel in cognitive tasks if their ecological needs and learning opportunities compensate for their lower computing power.
Powerful yet challenging: Mechanistic Niche Models for predicting invasive species potential distribution under climate change
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Risk assessments of invasive species are among the most challenging applications of species distribution models (SDMs). This challenge arises from the disequilibrium in invasive distributions, where recorded occurrences do not fully represent the species' potential range. The spatiotemporal dynamics of invasive populations are shaped by intraspecific variability, human-mediated introductions, [...]
Phylogenetic Signal in Shell Morphology of the Chemosymbiotic Lucinidae (Bivalvia)
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Lucinidae are the most specious family of extant chemosymbiotic bivalves and occupy a wide range of habitats worldwide. All extant lucinids examined to date house chemosynthetic endosymbionts within their gill tissues. Fossil evidence suggests a Silurian origin for the family, with chemosymbiotic associations dating back to at least the Late Jurassic. Previous systematics work indicates that [...]
Challenges and solutions for ecologists adopting AI
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can rapidly process large ecological datasets, uncover patterns, and inform conservation decisions. However, its adoption by ecologists is often hindered by steep learning curves, overwhelming model options with varying transparency, and uneven access to data, code, and technical skills. We led a workshop, EcoViz+AI: Visualization and AI for Ecology, that brought [...]
Incorporating responses of functional traits to changing climates into species distribution models: A path forward
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Conventional species distribution models (SDMs) typically consider only abiotic factors, thus overlooking critical biotic dimensions, including functional traits that play an important role determining species’ distributions in changing environments. Process-based models explicitly incorporate functional traits and have been applied to SDMs. However, their parameterization can be complex and [...]
Prevalence of Leaf Parasitism by Insects and Fungi in Wild Plant Communities: Implications for Community Assembly
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Parasitology, Plant Pathology, Population Biology
Parasitism by infectious diseases and insect pests significantly shapes wild plant communities by stabilizing them through suppressing dominant species and destabilizing them by suppressing minor species. However, the dynamics of parasitism in wild ecosystems remain understudied. This study aimed to determine whether parasites infect a wide range of host species or are plant-specific, assess the [...]
Bridging data silos to holistically model plant macrophenology
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Phenological response to global climate change can impact ecosystem functions. There are various data sources from which spatiotemporal and taxonomic phenological data may be obtained: mobilized herbaria, community science initiatives, observatory networks, and remote sensing. However, analyses conducted to date have generally relied on single sources of these data. Siloed treatment of data in [...]
Extreme events drive rapid and dynamic range fluctuations
Published: 2025-01-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Climate change is altering species’ distributions globally. Increasing frequency of extreme weather and climate events (EWCEs) is one of the hallmarks of climate change. Despite species redistribution being widely studied in response to longer-term climate trends, the contribution of EWCEs to range shifts is not well understood. We outline how EWCEs can trigger rapid and unexpected range boundary [...]
Assessment of Urban Bias in Iberian Butterfly Sampling through Citizen Science Data
Published: 2025-01-24
Subjects: Entomology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Citizen science platforms have revolutionized biodiversity monitoring by enabling large-scale data collection. However, concerns about potential biases, such as urban sampling bias, have raised questions about the quality and representativeness of these datasets. This study assesses the spatial distribution of butterfly observations collected through the citizen science platform Biodiversidad [...]
Seed biology and regeneration niche of the threatened cold desert perennial Ivesia webberi A. Gray
Published: 2025-01-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding the regeneration niche is of critical importance for the conservation of rare plants, yet species-specific information is often lacking for key components of the plant life cycle such as seed dormancy and germination. We conducted a detailed study of the regeneration niche for Ivesia webberi, a U.S. federally threatened forb that is endemic to the Great Basin Desert. Using seeds [...]
The rise and fall of proboscidean ecological diversity
Published: 2025-01-21
Subjects: Evolution
Proboscideans were keystone Cenozoic megaherbivores and present a highly relevant case study to frame the timing and magnitude of recent megafauna extinctions against long-term macroevolutionary patterns. By surveying the entire proboscidean fossil history using model-based approaches, we show that the dramatic Miocene explosion of proboscidean functional diversity was triggered by their [...]
Weather and landscape morphology drive thermal regime variation among Mývatn ponds, and implications for resident Arctic charr
Published: 2025-01-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Thermal stratification is common in lentic freshwater systems, and has extensive effects on ecosystem function and the interactions between aquatic organisms and their surroundings. Although thermal regimes in temperate systems are well-characterized, small arctic and subarctic lakes and ponds can have irregular thermal regimes, and the conditions leading to stratification and mixing are less [...]
Assessing migration and moulting strategy in closely related taxa based on stable isotope analysis: a population study of Balearic and Yelkouan shearwaters across their breeding range
Published: 2025-01-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Animal migrations are unique phenomena involving mass movements of individuals, which pose significant challenges to develop conservation strategies. Migratory seabirds, particularly, face many anthropogenic threats across their distributions, and populations are declining worldwide. We provided a thorough isotopic method to characterise individual migratory patterns and identify main moulting [...]
Bottom-up interactions in age-structured stock assessment and state-space mass-balance modelling
Published: 2025-01-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology
Age-structured stock assessment models are used worldwide to predict the likely impact of changing harvest on future fisheries yield. However, age-structured models ignore the impacts of predator consumption on prey survival (top-down impacts) and prey availability on predator growth (bottom-up impacts), whereas multispecies statistical catch-at-age models often incorporate top-down but not [...]