Preprints
There are 2847 Preprints listed.
Topological equivalence of stomata distribution patterns across vascular plants
Published: 2025-07-07
Subjects: Biology, Botany, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Stomata are ancient anatomical structures on leaves that regulate the exchange of water vapor, oxygen, and carbon dioxide between plants and the atmosphere. Acting as valve-like gateways between internal tissues and the external environment, stomata may function as locally interacting networks. Theoretical and experimental evidence suggests that local interactions among neighboring stomata [...]
Nature restoration legislation means redefining targets and forecasting progress
Published: 2025-07-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Nature restoration is at a pivotal moment, driven by global initiatives like the EU Nature Restoration Law and the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework. These frameworks pose key challenges to how restoration targets are defined to ensure they are not only achievable and measurable but also resilient to future environmental changes. This requires addressing two key challenges: setting [...]
Social information about others’ affective states in a human-altered world
Published: 2025-07-06
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
As a result of human-induced environmental change, animals increasingly face challenges that differ from those encountered throughout their evolutionary history. Whilst this has caused dramatic declines for many species, some can persist by gathering information to reduce uncertainty, thereby minimising risks and exploiting new opportunities. The strategic use of social information can be [...]
Still, the environment selects: disentangling the Effect of Distance Decay on Soil Bacterial Communities
Published: 2025-07-06
Subjects: Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences
Soil prokaryotes play a crucial role in terrestrial ecosystems, yet the relative importance of dispersal limitation, environmental selection, and biotic interactions in shaping their assembly remains unresolved. To better understand the underlying drivers of soil prokaryotic communities in temperate grasslands, we sampled grassland transects across Germany, and examined how geographic distance, [...]
movetrack: An R package to model flight paths from radio-telemetry networks
Published: 2025-07-04
Subjects: Research Methods in Life Sciences
Tracking small- to large-scale movements of animals is important for studying their interactions with the environment, including how they adjust and adapt their migration in response to environmental and human-induced changes. Despite the technical progress in tracking devices, a major challenge remains for small animals-such as songbirds, bats, and insects-because GPS transmitters are still too [...]
In What Way Does Climate Change Matter!?
Published: 2025-07-04
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Inequality and Stratification, International and Intercultural Communication, Political Economy, Race and Ethnicity, Technology and Innovation
I introduce the methodology of my nonproliferation research with quantum electrodynamics with the negative image equivalence with Charge-Coupled Devices. With the minimalist evidence gathering approach, I argue for a cosmologically relevant perspective in climate change that keeps an eye on the thermonuclear environment of outer space. I give a pilot narrative on the transcultural communication [...]
Social media data reveal novel habitats for invasive species
Published: 2025-07-03
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Invasive alien species pose significant threats to biodiversity, yet their distributions remain poorly documented across much of the tropics. Using Bangladesh, a megapopulated tropical country, we combine species distribution data from Facebook and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) to evaluate how data integration improves invasive alien species distribution. Our compiled [...]
Ungeneralizable generalizations? A meta-meta-analysis of the influence of taxonomic bias on the study of behavior
Published: 2025-07-03
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Meta-analysis is a powerful tool for synthesizing behavioral research and identifying general patterns. However, are the conclusions we draw from these analyses truly representative across animal groups? Alternatively, are our conclusions shaped by taxonomic biases in the underlying research? For example, in animal behavior, vertebrates are overrepresented in the research we conduct. This [...]
ON THE CONCEPT AND IMPLICATIONS OF GENETIC PURGING IN SMALL POPULATIONS
Published: 2025-07-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Genetic purging is increasingly considered a relevant factor in conservation genetics, as well as in evolutionary genetics. However, for a long time, it was de facto ignored when computing the expected evolution of population fitness under inbreeding (the inbreeding depression). More than a decade ago, I proposed a simple genetic analytical approximation to account for the consequences of genetic [...]
Tree Climbing for Research and Conservation: A Report on the 2nd Tree Climbing Workshop held at the University of Energy and Natural Resources, Sunyani, Ghana
Published: 2025-07-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
The second Tree Climbing Workshop, held from April 9–18, 2025 at the University of Energy and Natural Resources, Sunyani, Ghana, aimed to enhance canopy access and research capacity in West Africa. The workshop provided 11 participants from Ghana, Gabon, Guinea and Rwanda with skills in static and moving rope techniques, visual tree assessment, rescue rigging, and mounting scientific instruments [...]
A Unified Hypergraph- and SuperHyperGraph-Based Framework for Food Web Extension: From Classical Food Webs to SuperHyperWebs in Ecological Systems
Published: 2025-07-01
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Food Science, Life Sciences, Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Hypergraphs generalize graphs by allowing hyperedges to join any number of vertices, while superhypergraphs further extend this idea by layering iterated powersets to capture hierarchical, self-referential connections. A food web models an ecosystem as a directed graph whose nodes are species and whose edges represent predator–prey interactions. In this paper, we introduce two novel extensions of [...]
Bridging the scales: what can microbial ecologists learn from classic ecology?
Published: 2025-06-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Microbiology
The fields of ecology and microbiology have historically developed independently of one another, resulting in each having unique methods, terminology, and concepts. Microbial ecology aims to synthesise these perspectives, merging the molecular and reductionist strengths of the microbiologist with the systems-level viewpoint of the ecologist. However, unifying disciplines with independent [...]
Emerging tools to advance neuroethology in butterflies and moths
Published: 2025-06-30
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Entomology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Butterflies and moths have played historically important roles in developing our understanding of both ecology and evolutionary biology, and neuroethology. In both contexts, the diversity of behavioral strategies and specializations displayed by different Lepidoptera make them informative case studies. However, as in neuroscience more broadly, lepidopteran neuroethology has tended to focus on [...]
A call for phylogenetic context to understand geographic variation and host specificity in the parasitic copepod genus Salmincola
Published: 2025-06-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Freshwater parasitic copepods appear to exhibit great taxonomic diversity. However, little is known about gene flow between species or whether there is incongruence between morphological and phylogenetic species definitions. Additionally, little is known about what evolutionary factors may contribute to speciation across various lineages. The copepod genus Salmincola, which includes common [...]
Body condition as a shared response to environment in a commercially important demersal fish assemblage
Published: 2025-06-28
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Measures of an organism's weight at a given length are often considered reliable indicators of energy reserves or `condition', which can be related to fecundity and risk of mortality. Understanding the impact of environmental change on fish condition may therefore be critical for sustainable management of human activities in marine ecosystems. We investigated how changes in Canadian Pacific [...]