Preprints
There are 2762 Preprints listed.
Social plasticity across contexts in bobwhite quail
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
An animal’s social network centrality has been linked to social benefits. However, the inverse effect of providing benefits to conspecifics on one’s centrality has received less attention. We investigated effects of foraging success, and accompanying food access provided to others, on an individual’s relationships in multiple social contexts using three captive groups of bobwhite quail (Colinus [...]
Exploring the factors underlying adaptive social plasticity in foragers using an agent-based model
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Recent studies in group-living species suggest that being a valuable group member (a source of information or other resources) should increase social connectedness. This is because individuals may recognize and associate more with valuable individuals to increase the chances of benefiting from their activity, a process we refer to here as adaptive social plasticity. However, it is still unclear [...]
A Critical Evaluation of Ecological, Environmental, and Legal Consequences of Cedrus libani Afforestation and Monoculture Plantations in Lebanon: The Case of Mount Sannine
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration
Cedrus libani (Cedar of Lebanon) is ecologically and culturally significant, but vulnerable due to historical decline and ongoing threats. This has driven extensive afforestation and reforestation efforts in Lebanon. Initiatives like the Sannine Project, however, often utilize large-scale monoculture plantations, frequently as afforestation on land without confirmed historical dense forest cover. [...]
Strong impact of the recent Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza panzootic on population dynamics of a long-lived bird
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Population Biology
Since 2020, the spread of a new Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza virus (HPAIV-H5N1) has triggered the most severe wildlife panzootic ever recorded, with suspected population crashes in hundreds of species. Yet, no study has evaluated the demographic mechanisms underlying these declines. We used Integrated Population Models and population forecasts to evaluate the demographic impact of HPAIV-H5N1 [...]
The role of touch in marine mammal sociality: a review and future directions
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences
While social living has many advantages, it also has significant challenges associated with differences in individual interests, abilities, and intentions. Individuals in social species rely on diverse behaviours and signals across senses to mediate their relationships. In some species—particularly primates—touch plays a key role in establishing, affirming, and repairing social bonds. However, [...]
Assessing the species habitats in Colombia’s tropical dry forest over a 20 years period
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Forest Management, Other Life Sciences
Countries worldwide are collaborating under the Convention on Biological Diversity to address biodiversity loss. As part of this effort, the monitoring framework of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (K-M GBF) includes a set of indicators to track progress toward its goals and targets. One of these is the Species Habitat Index (SHI), a component indicator supporting Goal A, which [...]
Impacts of carbon farming practices on biodiversity at the farm scale
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Biodiversity loss from intensive agriculture poses a major threat to the long-term sustainability and resilience of food production systems. Sustainable land management practices, such as carbon farming, offer promising alternatives, but their biodiversity impacts and the most effective methods for detecting these impacts remain poorly understood. 2. We surveyed 19 farms in boreal Finland to [...]
Collectomics in plant biodiversity research - looking into the past to understand the present and shape the future
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Global biodiversity is changing at unprecedented rates during the Anthropocene. Whereas current biodiversity patterns can be observed directly, information from the recent past is far less easily retrieved yet urgently needed to understand present observations and predict future developments. For plants, herbaria offer such a unique glimpse into the past. Evaluation of plant specimens allows [...]
Meta-CHANS: Linking Metacommunity Ecology with Coupled Human and Nature Systems to Foster Conservation Management
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Spatial processes shape both ecological dynamics and human decision-making. Here, we propose a unifying framework – Meta-CHANS – that integrates metacommunity ecology into the concept of Coupled Human And Natural Systems (CHANS). We highlight how recent theoretical and methodological advances, especially in species distribution modeling and process inference, allow the identification of dominant [...]
Cellular Innovations and Diversity in the Lepidopteran Compound Eye
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics
Lepidoptera, having co-diversified with flowering plants and adapted to various diel niches, present a remarkable system for studying compound eye cell type diversity. Here we synthesize the latest research regarding lepidopteran eye evolution across different timescales, from species-level variation to family-level changes, and mechanistic levels, from broad anatomical variation to molecular [...]
Can physical closeness measure variation and change in pair association strength in captive geckos?
Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Zoology
Pair bonding is a key social behaviour but remains understudied in reptiles despite a growing body of evidence suggesting that some species exhibit complex sociality. The lack of evidence regarding the expression of pair association in social lizards species hampers our understanding of its effects on captive welfare. As a first step towards a better understanding of pair related social behaviour [...]
Borealization of tundra ecosystems with climate and land-use change
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
As the colder regions of the planet warm, species are moving northward and upward from the boreal forest to the tundra biome, a process that has been referred to as borealization. Here, we examine the diverse uses of the term borealization and propose the concept of tundra borealization for terrestrial environments to specifically describe shifts in species composition from boreal to tundra [...]
Decoding Genomic Landscapes of Introgression
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Genomic landscapes of introgression provide valuable information for how different evolutionary processes interact and leave signatures in genomes. The recent expansion of genomic datasets across diverse taxa, together with advances in methodological development, has created new opportunities to investigate the impact of introgression along individual genomes in various clades, making the precise [...]
Neighborhood habitat gains increase plant species richness in forest fragments
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Theory and indirect evidence suggest that when new habitat is added to a habitat fragment’s local landscape, or “neighborhood”, species richness in the fragment will increase. Although this hypothesis is frequently assumed, it has not yet been tested directly with longitudinal data. In a natural forest regeneration experiment on Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island, we use causal inference to show [...]
Minimum Sampling, Maximum Insight: Tracking Environmental Trends in a Tidal Estuary
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
Long-term environmental monitoring is essential for detecting ecological trends and managing dynamic systems. In estuarine environments, where monitoring is often constrained by cost and logistics, efficient resource allocation is key to sustaining effective programs. We developed a framework to optimize spatial and temporal sampling in the Great Bay Estuary (New Hampshire/Maine, USA), [...]