Preprints
There are 2534 Preprints listed.
Conservation macrogenetics reveals the potential hidden consequences of the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires on Australian biodiversity
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
The use of genetic analyses has become ubiquitous in conservation planning and management as biodiversity is increasingly threatened globally. Typically, such analyses are employed at the species-level, though as genetic data accrue, it is now possible to consider the genetic composition of multiple species across landscapes. Such macrogenetic perspectives can reveal the potential genetic [...]
On the Repeated Evolution of Parthenogenesis in Stick Insects
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
A striking aspect of the biology of stick insects is the widespread occurrence of parthenogenesis, including rare, spontaneous events in sexual species, facultative parthenogenesis as well as obligately parthenogenetic species. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the origins, mechanisms, and evolutionary consequences of parthenogenesis in stick insects, with a particular focus on its [...]
Model-based ordination for phenological studies: from controlling sampling bias to inferring temporal associations
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Multivariate Analysis, Statistical Methodology
Willig et al. (Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 15, 868--885, 2024) cautioned that unequal sampling effort and pseudoreplication can bias the characterisation of species phenology using circular statistics. Borrowing concepts from rarefaction, they proposed bootstrapping to control for time-varying marginal totals that arise from unequal sampling effort over time. This study extends their [...]
Validating causal inference in time series models with conditional-independence tests
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Sustainability
Ecologists often use time-series models to approximate dynamics arising from density dependence, species interactions, community synchrony, and other processes. Dynamic structural equation models can represent simultaneous and lagged interactions among variables with missing data, and therefore encompasses a wide family of analyses (linear regression, vector autoregressive models, and dynamic [...]
The Individualized Niche: A Case Study in Scientific Conceptual Change
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Other Arts and Humanities, Philosophy
We explore the causes and outcomes of scientific conceptual change using a case study of the development of the individualized niche concept. We outline a framework for characterizing conceptual change that distinguishes between epistemically adaptive and neutral processes and outcomes of conceptual change. We then apply this framework in tracing how the individualized niche concept arose [...]
Urban trace metal contamination is negatively associated with condition and wing morphology in a common waterbird
Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Urban areas suffer from different forms of environmental pollution by light, noise, and chemicals. Pollution by heavy metals has long been associated with industrialization and urbanization processes, increasing the risk of bioaccumulation and compromising the health, condition, and fitness of urban animals. Here, we aimed to investigate the effects of urbanization on bioaccumulation of six heavy [...]
Wing length canalisation and behaviour across birds: a phylogenetic meta-analysis of variance
Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Stronger stabilising selection is expected to lead to a decrease in trait variation (i.e., in higher canalisation). We examined this prediction across species by investigating individual variation in wing length across measured as the coefficient of variation (CV). We hypothesised that species that heavily rely on aerial feeding as well as long-distance migratory species should show higher [...]
The human fingerprint of medicinal plant species diversity
Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Anthropology, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biotechnology, Environmental Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures
Medicinal plants have long been crucial to human civilizations, supporting both traditional and modern healthcare systems. However, the processes influencing the global diversity and distribution of medicinal plants remain underexplored. Their diversity, like that of other species groups, is shaped by abiotic and biotic influences, which include, in unique ways, human ecological (including [...]
The Interaction Affinity Between Flowers and Their Pollinators
Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
It is a common knowledge that the probability of the fertilisation of a flower by its pollinator is a function of species abundances. However, this relation was rarely formalised for analysing pollination networks. In this opinion paper, a simple model borrowed from physical chemistry is introduced to formalise this functional dependence. This led to a well-known biochemical concept of affinity, [...]
MYB regulator of ‘colorless’ flavonols underlies the evolution of red flowers in Iochroma (Solanaceae)
Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Anthocyanins, the pigments that give rise to blue, purple, red and pink colors in many flowers and fruits, are produced by the deeply conserved flavonoid biosynthesis pathway. The regulation of this pathway is thus fundamental for species differences in color across flowering plants, and a growing body of evidence implicates MYB transcription factors as key players activating or suppressing the [...]
Micro- and nanoplastic effects on the reproduction of Daphnia spp. - a meta-analysis
Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Several traits of micro- and nanoplastic particles (MNPs), including among others, polymer type, size, and shape, have been shown to influence MNP toxicity. The direction and size of these moderating effects are however often unclear and generalizations from single studies are difficult to establish. Meta-analyses, which quantitatively aggregate data on a specific topic, can be used to increase [...]
Extremely low primary production after a decade long drought contributed to the local extinction of a group-living rodent
Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Some species exhibit physiological and behavioral plasticity to survive adverse periods, such as changing climates or reduced food availability. Yet, during extreme climatic events the mechanisms to respond to these adverse periods may not be sufficient, potentially driving local population extinctions. We studied the population dynamics of a common degu (Octodon degus) population in central [...]
Inferring reproductive phenology and success from proportions of juveniles in population monitoring
Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Ornithology, Statistical Methodology
1. Phenological shifts caused by climate change are increasingly documented in wild populations by the widespread collection of datasets on reproductive timing and success. These phenological events are often inferred by examining changes in population abundance and age structure throughout the breeding season. However, the quantitative relationship between the observed proportion of juveniles [...]
Evolvability in vertebrate segmentation
Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
The number of vertebrae in the axial skeleton of vertebrates is extremely diverse, and reflects adaptations to a diverse range of habitats and lifestyles. The capacity for heritable evolutionary change in the number of vertebrae - its evolvability - is underpinned by the process of somitogenesis, which determines the number of somites that form in the early embryo. However, despite the [...]
Measuring natural selection on the transcriptome
Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Other Genetics and Genomics
The level and pattern of gene expression is increasingly recognized as a principal determinant of plant phenotypes and thus of fitness. The estimation of natural selection on the transcriptome is an emerging research discipline. We here review recent progress and consider the challenges posed by the high dimensionality of the transcriptome for the multiple regression methods routinely used to [...]