Preprints
There are 2806 Preprints listed.
Behavioural repertoire and the onset of precocious sexual behaviours in juvenile ruffs (Calidris pugnax)
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Adult phenotypes are shaped by developmental processes during early life. This also applies to reproduction and dominance-related behaviours before maturation, called precocious sexual behaviours. However, beyond largely anecdotal reports, the onset of such behaviours is rarely studied. Here we document the development of precocious sexual behaviours in the ruff Calidris pugnax, a lekking [...]
The Origins of Human Cooperation Through Intergroup Relations in Our Closest Living Relatives
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Cooperation is the foundation of human society, yet our understanding of its evolutionary origins and underlying mechanisms remains limited. This review draws on intergroup encounters in our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), to better understand the evolutionary pressures and processes that shaped human cooperation. In chimpanzees, [...]
Mapping Cultural Ecosystem Service Flows from Social Media Imagery with Vision–Language Models: A Zero-Shot CLIP Framework
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Computational Engineering, Computer Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability
Geotagged social media imagery provides a valuable source for mapping cultural ecosystem service (CES) flows, which represent realized human interactions with nature, yet its open-world user-generated content poses challenges to automated content analysis. Supervised models require large labeled datasets and show limited generalization across contexts, whereas unsupervised approaches often need [...]
PROPOSAL of A MONITORING PLAN for THE EUROPEAN EEL, ANGUILLA ANGUILLA L. 1758, IN SICILY.
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
We outline a monitoring plan for European eel that has been proposed in 2021, as part of of the preparatory activities for the elaboration of the Regional Eel Management Plan for Sicily (project FEAMP OP 2014/2020, MEASURE 2.49, Sicilian Regional Administration), to be included in the National Management Plan (Regulation EC 1100/2007). Sampling methods and time-frames diversified for juveniles, [...]
A Satellite-based Approach to Investigating Eutrophication in Lakes Receiving Wastewater Treatment Effluent: A Case Study of Lake Windermere
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Excessive phosphorus from the sewer systems in the UK is a major contributor to eutrophication in freshwater bodies. Chlorophyll-a levels are widely used as a reliable indicator of phosphorus driven eutrophication, and satellite remote sensing provides an effective means of monitoring these dynamics at high spatial and temporal resolution. This study evaluated the utility of Sentinel-2 imagery in [...]
The weak driver conundrum: data archiving and biological phenomena impact macrogenetic findings
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Evolution, Genetics, Genomics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Macrogenetics seeks to identify the global drivers and patterns in intraspecific genetic diversity, yet many reported patterns are weak or inconsistent. To achieve multispecies global inference, many macrogenetic studies leverage open sequencing data that can suffer from archiving biases. It remains unclear if macrogenetic inconsistencies are innate genetic phenomena, or are the product of open [...]
Acorn availability reduces agricultural damage by ungulates
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Human-wildlife conflicts, particularly the damage to agricultural crops caused by ungulates, pose significant ecological and economic challenges. Understanding the role of natural food availability in driving these conflicts is important for developing effective management strategies. We investigated how the pulsed availability of forest tree seeds, i.e., mast seeding, influences the extent of [...]
The Plant Communities of Oman’s Central Coastline: A Baseline Ecological Assessment amid Rising Threats
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Desert Ecology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
In recent decades, the botanical knowledge within the Sultanate of Oman has advanced considerably. However, the coastal vegetation is comparatively understudied with much of the country’s extensive coastline still undocumented. This is despite Oman’s coast being faced with a plethora of threats including development, overgrazing and the invasive species Neltuma juliflora. This study presents the [...]
Life-history-specific thresholds for the Fishing Mortality Index: validation on 209 stocks
Published: 2025-12-09
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
The exploitation fraction E = F/(F+M) has served as a standard metric for assessing fishing pressure since Gulland (1971), with E = 0.5 widely adopted as a precautionary threshold. However, E compresses the relationship between fishing mortality (F) and natural mortality (M) into a single dimension, obscuring magnitude differences across life histories. We introduce the Fishing Mortality Index [...]
Microbial contributions to host life history tradeoffs
Published: 2025-12-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
All organisms must allocate finite resources among growth, maintenance, and reproduction, generating trade-offs that constrain adaptation. Here, we argue that host microbiomes are dynamic resource engines capable of reallocating and generating energy and resources for their hosts. In doing so, they may recalibrate the tradeoffs fundamental to life history evolution.
Quantifying Three Decades of Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining Frontiers in the Guiana Shield (1995–2024)
Published: 2025-12-09
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Remote Sensing, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM) is a leading driver of tropical deforestation and forest degradation, yet its spatial and temporal dynamics remain largely underexplored. Here, we present a pan-regional, annual time-series analysis of ASGM expansion across rainforests of the Guiana Shield (Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana) from 1995 to 2024. Using Landsat imagery, we trained a deep [...]
A chronosequence of human remains on soil microbial populations
Published: 2025-12-08
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Surficial human decomposition produces substantial and measurable shifts in soil chemistry and microbial composition. This decade-long investigation examined temporal changes beneath surface deposited human remains and identified strong microbial and chemical responses in the first twelve to twenty four months, including decreased microbial diversity, elevated soil nutrients and sustained [...]
From patterns to predictions: A framework for the spatial epidemiology of wildlife diseases
Published: 2025-12-08
Subjects: Animal Diseases, Biodiversity, Epidemiology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Statistics and Probability, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Veterinary Preventive Medicine, Epidemiology, and Public Health, Zoology
Wildlife diseases pose a significant threat to public health, livestock, and biodiversity conservation. In this context, spatial epidemiology offers a robust framework for elucidating disease dynamics and informing policy-making and disease management. The workflow in spatial epidemiology involves three main steps: (1) descriptive analysis of spatial dynamics; (2) exploration of the observed [...]
Habitat connectivity shapes biodiversity outcomes in Indonesia’s community-managed forests
Published: 2025-12-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Management
1. Social forestry is increasingly promoted as a means to achieve equitable resource governance while contributing to biodiversity conservation. Yet, empirical evidence on how effectively community-managed forests support biodiversity remains limited, particularly in tropical regions. 2. We assessed mammal communities in two contrasting social forestry contexts in Sumatra, Indonesia: (1) a [...]
There is no taxon-free lunch
Published: 2025-12-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Over the last few decades, the term “taxon-free” has been widely used in paleoecological literature to highlight reasoning via ecomorphological or other functional traits of organisms as opposed to reasoning via taxonomic affiliations and phylogenetic conservatism. In practice, however, “taxon-free” inferences are very rarely free from using taxonomic information and occasionally they are even [...]