Preprints
There are 2534 Preprints listed.
Combined effects of land-use- and climate-driven stressors on stream fungi and organic matter decomposition
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Freshwater microbial communities are essential for maintaining ecosystem functions and services, with aquatic fungi playing a particularly critical role in decomposing terrestrial organic matter entering streams and converting it into energy and nutrients that sustain higher trophic levels. However, freshwater ecosystems face growing threats from multiple stressors. The combined effects of these [...]
Forever an optimist? Investigating the temporal consistency of optimism within and across life phases in rats
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
It is long known from human psychology that people differ in their perception of the world, with some judging ambiguous information more positively (i.e., “optimists”) and some more negatively (i.e., “pessimists”). About 20 years ago, this knowledge was transferred to animal welfare science to assess emotional states in animals by quantifying optimistic or pessimistic judgement biases. More [...]
Emergence, spread, and impact of high pathogenicity avian influenza H5 in wild birds and mammals of South America and Antarctica, October 2022 to March 2024
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
The currently circulating high pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) virus of the subtype H5 causes variable illness and death in wild and domestic birds and mammals, as well as in humans. This virus evolved from the Goose/Guangdong lineage of HPAI H5 virus, which emerged in commercial poultry in China in 1996, spilled over into wild birds, and spread through Asia, Europe, Africa and North America [...]
Promoting the use of phylogenetic multinomial generalised mixed-effects model to understand the evolution of discrete traits
Published: 2025-01-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
Phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) are fundamental tools for understanding trait evolution across species. While linear models are widely used for continuous traits in ecology and evolution, their application to discrete traits - particularly ordinal and nominal traits - remains limited. Researchers sometimes recategorise such traits into binary traits (0 or 1 data) to make them more [...]
Mapping Cheatgrass Along California’s Roadways and Powerlines to Identify High-Risk Ignition Zones
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Climate, Computational Engineering
Between 2001 and 2023, wildfires in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) caused by power lines, vehicles, and equipment accounted for approximately 23% of the total area burned by identified ignition sources, burning an estimated 3 million acres in California alone. These ignition sources have been major contributors to the destruction of infrastructure, loss of life, and air pollution in WUI [...]
Cognitive evolution in major vertebrate clades: the Lack of Attentional Control hypothesis and the Cognition-Opportunities-Needs framework
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology
The observed difference in relative brain size between endotherms and ectotherms raises questions about potential resulting disparities in brain function between these two groups. Until recently, no clear cognitive advantage was found in endotherms, with ectotherms occasionally even outperforming them in seemingly complex tasks. However, recent research on working memory—a core executive [...]
Powerful yet challenging: Mechanistic Niche Models for predicting invasive species potential distribution under climate change
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Risk assessments of invasive species are among the most challenging applications of species distribution models (SDMs). This challenge arises from the disequilibrium in invasive distributions, where recorded occurrences do not fully represent the species' potential range. The spatiotemporal dynamics of invasive populations are shaped by intraspecific variability, human-mediated introductions, [...]
Phylogenetic Signal in Shell Morphology of the Chemosymbiotic Lucinidae (Bivalvia)
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Lucinidae are the most specious family of extant chemosymbiotic bivalves and occupy a wide range of habitats worldwide. All extant lucinids examined to date house chemosynthetic endosymbionts within their gill tissues. Fossil evidence suggests a Silurian origin for the family, with chemosymbiotic associations dating back to at least the Late Jurassic. Previous systematics work indicates that [...]
Challenges and solutions for ecologists adopting AI
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can rapidly process large ecological datasets, uncover patterns, and inform conservation decisions. However, its adoption by ecologists is often hindered by steep learning curves, overwhelming model options with varying transparency, and uneven access to data, code, and technical skills. We led a workshop, EcoViz+AI: Visualization and AI for Ecology, that brought [...]
Incorporating responses of functional traits to changing climates into species distribution models: A path forward
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Conventional species distribution models (SDMs) typically consider only abiotic factors, thus overlooking critical biotic dimensions, including functional traits that play an important role determining species’ distributions in changing environments. Process-based models explicitly incorporate functional traits and have been applied to SDMs. However, their parameterization can be complex and [...]
Prevalence of Leaf Parasitism by Insects and Fungi in Wild Plant Communities: Implications for Community Assembly
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Parasitology, Plant Pathology, Population Biology
Parasitism by infectious diseases and insect pests significantly shapes wild plant communities by stabilizing them through suppressing dominant species and destabilizing them by suppressing minor species. However, the dynamics of parasitism in wild ecosystems remain understudied. This study aimed to determine whether parasites infect a wide range of host species or are plant-specific, assess the [...]
Bridging data silos to holistically model plant macrophenology
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Phenological response to global climate change can impact ecosystem functions. There are various data sources from which spatiotemporal and taxonomic phenological data may be obtained: mobilized herbaria, community science initiatives, observatory networks, and remote sensing. However, analyses conducted to date have generally relied on single sources of these data. Siloed treatment of data in [...]
Extreme events drive rapid and dynamic range fluctuations
Published: 2025-01-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Climate change is altering species’ distributions globally. Increasing frequency of extreme weather and climate events (EWCEs) is one of the hallmarks of climate change. Despite species redistribution being widely studied in response to longer-term climate trends, the contribution of EWCEs to range shifts is not well understood. We outline how EWCEs can trigger rapid and unexpected range boundary [...]
Assessment of Urban Bias in Iberian Butterfly Sampling through Citizen Science Data
Published: 2025-01-24
Subjects: Entomology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Citizen science platforms have revolutionized biodiversity monitoring by enabling large-scale data collection. However, concerns about potential biases, such as urban sampling bias, have raised questions about the quality and representativeness of these datasets. This study assesses the spatial distribution of butterfly observations collected through the citizen science platform Biodiversidad [...]
Seed biology and regeneration niche of the threatened cold desert perennial Ivesia webberi A. Gray
Published: 2025-01-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding the regeneration niche is of critical importance for the conservation of rare plants, yet species-specific information is often lacking for key components of the plant life cycle such as seed dormancy and germination. We conducted a detailed study of the regeneration niche for Ivesia webberi, a U.S. federally threatened forb that is endemic to the Great Basin Desert. Using seeds [...]