Preprints
There are 3011 Preprints listed.
Natural developmental temperatures of ectotherms: A systematic map and comparative analysis
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In ectothermic animals, physiological processes are highly sensitive to environmental temperatures. Developmental temperatures, in particular, have large and long-lasting impacts on ectotherm phenotypes. However, most phenotypic responses are studied in the laboratory, and may not accurately reflect ecological impacts in natural environments. In this study, we provide the first synthesis of [...]
Mapping the landscape of live baitfish regulations for aquatic invasive species prevention in the United States
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Policy, Marine Biology, Public Policy
Aquatic invasive species (AIS) pose a significant risk to global ecosystems, economies, and societies. In the United States, the live baitfish trade is a major pathway for their spread. While the presence of invasive species and pathogens in this trade has been documented, a comprehensive, nationwide analysis of the regulations governing live baitfish has been lacking. This study fills that gap [...]
Integrating Participatory Mapping and Stewardship Perspectives to Support Human–Wildlife Coexistence in Shared Landscapes
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Environmental Studies, Spatial Science
Understanding the drivers of coexistence between humans and wildlife in shared landscapes is critical for biodiversity conservation. This inquiry challenges us to reflect on our relationships with nature and highlights the need to consider the complexity of social-ecological systems. Although useful approaches exist for mapping the distribution of species, habitats, or ecosystems using [...]
In African savannas, are donor and trophic control of ungulate prey coupled by apparent competition?
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how donor (bottom-up) and trophic (top-down) modes of population control shape food web structure and dynamics has long been a major goal of ecology, yet consensus about mechanisms is lacking. Two prevalent patterns hint at generality in mechanisms that shape predator-prey communities. First, within communities, herbivore biomass declines and plant biomass increases in the presence [...]
Fossils for Future: the billion-dollar case for paleontology’s digital infrastructure
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Bioinformatics, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Arts and Humanities, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The digital revolution has transformed paleontology through the development of open-access, community-driven databases that underpin some of the most impactful research in biodiversity, climate change, and extinction dynamics. These systems safeguard high-effort, volunteered data and have revealed major macroevolutionary patterns, including mass extinctions. However, of 118 paleontological and [...]
Phenotypic divergence and eco-evolutionary dynamics in moor frog tadpoles
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
In the face of rapid environmental change, persistence of natural populations often relies on evolutionary rescue. Such rapid evolution can, in turn, affect ecosystem properties (i.e. cause evo-to-eco effects), as recently documented across taxa and ecosystems. Amphibians often act as keystone species, making them ideal candidates for studying eco-evolutionary dynamics, yet empirical studies [...]
A standardised framework for classifying estimates of reproductive isolation across the Tree of Life
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Evolution
Understanding reproductive isolation (RI) between lineages is a central goal of speciation research. While the strength of RI has been estimated across a broad range of taxa, synthesising these data remains challenging, partially because we lack a common language for classifying and reporting RI estimates. Here, we present the Reproductive Isolation Ontology (RIO), a structured framework designed [...]
A new participatory conservation framework built on the rise of native plant gardening
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Global biodiversity strategies are ambitious on paper but fall short in practice. It is not strategy we lack but the capacity to translate these plans into action on the ground. Akin to the community scientists that revolutionized biodiversity monitoring, we posit that community stewards, emerging from the growing native plant gardening movement, could help scale up science-informed plant [...]
A concept using α-niche evolution within bacterial communities to direct β-niche evolution of focal species
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
The process of bacterial adaptation has a profound impact on human wellbeing and health, but our toolkit to modify evolution is limited. Here, we present a concept of how steering adaptation can be achieved by integration of bacterial evolution and microbial ecology. The fundamental question is how specific species bloom after community perturbance and subsequently evolve. We consider two kinds [...]
"Homo informatio"
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Did very “small-world” networks enhance the Darwinian fitness of primaeval Homo through exchanges of information that enabled exploration of resources beyond those exploitable at hand? An active inference suggestion is offered about the early evolution of human social behaviour. A phylogenetic split ~7.5 Ma (million years ago) separated paninan ancestors that were unlike today's chimpanzees, and [...]
Social uncertainty influences the optimal balance of quantity and quality of cooperative relationships
Published: 2025-09-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Many group-living animals develop and maintain stable affiliative social relationships. These ‘social bonds’ can benefit survival and reproduction, but they require significant investments of time and energy. How should individuals allocate those investments towards building new relationships (“diversifying”) versus maintaining existing ones (“focusing”)? The ‘social bet-hedging’ hypothesis [...]
Closing the Coral Life Cycle: A service blueprint to overcome the coral recruitment crisis through research, restoration, and innovation
Published: 2025-09-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Coral reefs underpin marine biodiversity and the functioning of oceanic ecosystems, yet since the 1970s they have experienced unprecedented degradation, with the Caribbean region exhibiting some of the most acute declines. Global climate change—through warming, acidification, and intensified storm activity—combined with local stressors such as sedimentation, eutrophication, and over‑exploitation, [...]
No effect of ocean acidification on individual-level variation in behaviour and susceptibility to predation in a Great Barrier Reef damselfish
Published: 2025-09-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biology, Integrative Biology, Marine Biology, Physiology, Zoology
1) Ocean acidification, caused by rising carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, has been reported to negatively impact a wide variety of behaviours in fishes, including activity, exploration, and predator avoidance. 2) These effects have been documented at the population level, but many animal species naturally show large and repeatable individual-level differences in behaviour. How [...]
Distribution et noyaux périphériques de la Pie-grièche méridionale Lanius meridionalis en France : apport d’un modèle de distribution d’espèces
Published: 2025-09-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Cette étude analyse les facteurs environnementaux influençant la distribution de la Pie-grièche méridionale Lanius meridionalis en France à partir d’observations 2020–2023 collectées en période de reproduction. La probabilité de présence est principalement expliquée par des variables climatiques, topographiques et d’occupation du sol. Elle augmente avec la température moyenne du trimestre le plus [...]
Systematic review of heatwave experiments on plant health and survival
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Background: Heatwaves, which are becoming more intense and more frequent due to global warming, are a major threat to the stability of plant populations and ecosystems. Safeguarding ecosystem function requires a clear understanding of vulnerability to these extreme events. Yet vulnerability cannot be reliably inferred from experiments that manipulate only mean temperatures or from standard [...]