Preprints
There are 2829 Preprints listed.
Proximity to natural habitat is not consistently associated with pollination services in tropical smallholder farms: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Published: 2025-05-13
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Proximity to natural habitat is known to enhance pollination services in large-scale agriculture, but it remains unclear whether this holds in tropical smallholder farms. These systems are embedded in ecologically complex landscapes, central to global food security, and depend heavily on biodiversity-derived ecosystem services. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 35 studies [...]
Ecological traits explain wild felid responses to human-modified landscapes in Brazil: an open-data approach for conservation
Published: 2025-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how wild felids respond to human-modified landscapes is critical for designing effective conservation strategies, yet comparative assessments across species remain scarce in tropical regions. Here, we assess the habitat selection and road sensitivity of nine wild felid species in Brazil using an integrative and scalable framework based entirely on open-access data. We compiled over [...]
Correcting Mesoudi’s Failed Concept of Societal Culture
Published: 2025-05-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract: The natural species homo sapiens are not a cultural species. Homo sapiens instead artificially segregates itself into many artificial species (i.e., cultures) for competitive advantage in natural intraspecies competition – warfare, economics, etc. These artificial species are defined and categorized based on the distinct combination of artificial genomes, artificial structural [...]
Aligning Behavioural Ecotoxicology with Real-World Water Concentrations: Current Minimum Tested Levels for Pharmaceuticals Far Exceed Environmental Reality
Published: 2025-05-13
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Toxicology
Behavioural ecotoxicology has emerged as a key research area, offering sensitive and ecologically meaningful endpoints for detecting contaminant effects. Much of this work has focused on pharmaceutical pollutants, now widely recognised as contaminants of emerging concern. Given the field’s rapid growth and increasing data availability, we synthesised four global databases to evaluate the [...]
Negative effects of climate change and fishing activities on Alaskan seabird populations (2002-2011)
Published: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Seabird populations along the Alaskan coast have been rapidly declining due to anthropogenic climate change and other associated factors. This study examines the effects of sea surface temperature (SST) and fishing activity on the abundance of Alaskan seabird species. We downloaded bird observation data from the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) and then matched the seabird [...]
Differential assembly of core and non-core host-microbe network structures along a land-use change gradient
Published: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Microbial communities are fundamental to host health, yet their assembly dynamics under environmental change remain poorly understood. We analyzed individual-level host-microbe networks in the non-native wild black rats (Rattus rattus) across a land-use gradient in Madagascar. By applying a moving prevalence threshold, we distinguished between core and non-core microbes and compared the assembly [...]
Culmulative Cultural Evolution - A Flawed Concept
Published: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract: The concept of cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) is fundamentally flawed. The second process of evolution is enacted via imagination at the individual level. This process utilizes an artificial genome within our mind when conceiving a new idea. Homo sapiens has expanded the artificial genome available to each of us, but this does not amount to a cumulative process practically. It is [...]
The Community Genetic Distribution (CGD): A unifying measure for monitoring biodiversity change
Published: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity
Monitoring the condition of ecological communities is essential to understanding, managing and conserving biodiversity. Much needed is a means to measure holistic properties that emerge from ecological communities, in other words attributes that characterize communities as a whole rather than individual species or sets of species. Here, we propose the Community Genetic Distribution (CGD) as a [...]
Applying essential ecosystem service variables to analyse thirty years of wild salmon provisioning trends in Canada
Published: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Wild salmon commercial fisheries in British Columbia (BC), Canada, have seen decreasing return and catch numbers across multiple salmon populations. Successful management of this ecosystem service (ES) has been elusive, but there is recognition that a wider social-ecological perspective is needed to support recovery. While ES monitoring is essential for evidence-based management, the [...]
Combined warming and drying slow temperate-boreal tree litter decomposition, while warm-grown leaf litter foreshadows an unexpected decomposition signal
Published: 2025-05-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Plant litter decomposition is a primary control on terrestrial carbon fluxes and is critical to soil temperature, fauna, and nutrients, among many other biotic and abiotic factors. Individually, the key mediators of decomposition—litter traits, temperature, and moisture—are relatively well understood. However, our understanding of how combined climate drivers influence decomposition remains [...]
Microclimf: fast modelling of microclimate across real landscapes in R
Published: 2025-05-08
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Many ecological studies require climate data, but readily available datasets are poor surrogates for the conditions that organisms experience in nature. Understanding the climatic conditions experienced by organisms requires modelling microclimate rather than relying on coarse, station-based climate data. 2. I present microclimf, a mechanistic microclimate model designed for computationally [...]
The ecological relevance of fast-cycling mineral-associated organic matter – a dynamic pool of 'persistent’ soil carbon and nitrogen
Published: 2025-05-08
Subjects: Agriculture, Biogeochemistry, Soil Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Longstanding theories and models classify mineral-associated organic matter (MAOM) as the large (~60%) but slow-cycling and persistent portion of the soil organic matter (SOM) pool. Strong physico-chemical interactions and diffusion limitations restrict the turnover of MAOM, allowing carbon and nitrogen bound therein to persist in soil for as long as centuries to millennia. However, MAOM is a [...]
The promise of environmental RNA research beyond mRNA
Published: 2025-05-08
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Environmental RNA (eRNA) studies have primarily focused on species detection and community composition through metabarcoding or metatranscriptomics, and on gene expression through messenger RNA (mRNA) abundance analysis. While valuable, this focus overlooks the broader functional roles of other RNA types in cellular metabolism. Beyond mRNA, non-coding RNAs as well as structural RNAs play critical [...]
Unifying occupancy-detection and local frequency scaling (Frescalo) models
Published: 2025-05-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Frescalo’s “local frequency scaling” and classical occupancy-detection models both seek to recover true species‐occurrence signals from imperfect data. In this paper, we show that the two approaches rest on the same underlying detection mathematics. Occupancy models treat each site’s repeat visits as independent detection trials and separately estimate occupancy probability and per-visit [...]
Removing dead coral after marine heatwaves can mitigate coral-algae competition and increase viable coral recruitment
Published: 2025-05-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Ecological disturbance regimes are shifting and leaving behind novel legacies, like the remnant structures of dead foundation species, which have poorly known impacts on ecosystem resilience. We explored how dead coral skeletons produced by marine heatwaves–material legacies of increasingly common disturbances on coral reefs–influence spatial competition between corals and macroalgae, focusing on [...]