Preprints
There are 2992 Preprints listed.
The Marsupial Database: A comprehensive dataset on the ecology and life history of American and Australasian marsupials
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Marsupials are an important but typically neglected group of mammals that have been overlooked in many comparative analyses of vertebrate ecology and life-history evolution. In order to address this knowledge bias, we have developed The Marsupial Database. The Marsupial Database contains traits for a phylogenetically diverse set of 414 extant and recently extinct (last 200 years) species from all [...]
Physical and Migration Metrics of White Storks (Ciconia ciconia) and the influence that landfills play in their variation
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Zoology
1. White storks (Ciconia Ciconia) are a traditionally fully migratory species and their numbers in western Europe were decimated in the last century. Their numbers have since boomed and they have altered their migratory strategy to have become a partially migratory species. This change has been ascribed in large part to anthropogenic food subsidies, particularly in the form of landfill sites. 2. [...]
Assessing direct effects of insect change on insectivore populations in the United Kingdom
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
1. Declines in insect abundance are a cause for concern, with potential downstream impacts on the function of ecosystems. Insects are key food resources for insectivorous vertebrates, with evidence that declines in these species could be driven by changing insect abundance. 2. Quantifying the direct effect of insect abundance on vertebrate population dynamics is challenging especially at large [...]
Cover crops influence aboveground and belowground invertebrates in farmlands
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1. Maintaining vegetation diversity through cover crops could counteract the decreasing soil carbon and biodiversity in intensive monoculture farming, but its impacts on fauna have rarely been quantified. 2. To investigate how cover crops influence the abundance and trophic structure of invertebrates, or inorganic N (proxy of soil functioning), barley (Hordeum vulgare) was grown with up to eight [...]
Recruitment bottlenecks and reinforcing environmental degradation drive marsh collapse
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ecosystem collapse is often attributed to the absence of stress-tolerant species, yet many climate-stressed systems fail even when these species remain regionally present. This raises a critical, unresolved question: does collapse result from species pool depletion, or from failed recruitment? We addressed this by combining vegetation surveys and a three-year transplant experiment in sea level [...]
The number of strong social bonds is linked to survival in a cooperative bird
Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Recent evidence from large mammals, including humans, shows that the quality of social associations beyond general group size can positively influence health and survival. However, whether individuals in other taxa consistently differ in sociality in ways that affect fitness and thus provide a basis for selection remains largely unexplored. In this study, we examined how individual sociality [...]
Social-ecological networks in urban ecology research
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Urban Studies and Planning
Urban ecosystems are complex and dynamic, shaped by feedback loops between social and ecological components. However, urban ecology requires tools to unravel this complexity. Social-ecological networks (SENs) offer a conceptual and analytical framework by integrating network theory to understand the relationships between and within social-ecological systems. Here, we integrate perspectives from [...]
Latitudinal genetic diversity gradients steepen toward the poles
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Evolution, Genetics, Population Biology
Latitudinal biodiversity gradients are among the best-described biogeographic patterns. However, there is little agreement on whether genetic diversity, the most fundamental level of biodiversity, is also latitudinally distributed. The confusion about the distribution of genetic diversity at biogeographic scales stems in part from the fact that genetic diversity gradients have been described for [...]
Location–scale models in ecology and evolution: heteroscedasticity in continuous, count and proportion data
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ecological data seldom meet the assumption of constant variance. Yet patterns of heteroscedasticity often reflect biologically meaningful variation, such as differences in plasticity or variable responses to environmental stresses. However, most studies model only the mean, treating variance as statistical noise. Here, we describe location–scale regression modeling, which estimates mean [...]
Six decades of losses and gains in alpha diversity of European plant communities
Published: 2025-07-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Biodiversity change forecasts rely on long-term time series, but such data are often scarce in space and time. Here, we interpolated spatiotemporal changes in species richness using a novel machine learning method without requiring temporal replication at sites. Using 698,692 one-time survey vegetation plots, we estimated trends in vascular plant alpha diversity across Europe from 1960 to 2020 [...]
Long-term change in precipitation and its variability and consequences in a montane environment
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The climate at high altitudes is changing more rapidly than in many other areas, with a variety of consequences for montane flora and fauna. We analyze long-term weather records from Crested Butte (2703m, 1910- 2024) and Gothic (2921m, 1974 – 2024), Colorado, USA, in the West Elk Mountains. In Crested Butte, mean monthly precipitation in the growing season (May – September) can vary by over [...]
FIRST RECORD OF THE SOUTH EUROPEAN ROACH, SarmaRutilus rubilio (Bonaparte, 1837) IN THE ASINARO RIVER BASIN (SICILY, ITALY).
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
The first record of the South European Roach Sarmarutilus rubilio (Bonaparte, 1837) introduced to the Asinaro river basin (SE Sicily) is reported. The species, alien to Sicily, was sampled/observed in May-June 2025 almost along the entire main river, from near the headwaters up to about 3 km from the mouth. The SE Roach is able to reproduce in this environment, as evidenced by the presence of [...]
The Minimum Carbon Theory: A Physiological Basis for Species Coexistence
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how species coexist and why diversity varies across regions remains a central challenge in ecology. Although existing theories such as niche theory, neutral theory, and modern coexistence theory have yielded important insights into species coexistence and diversity, their reliance on abstract parameters lacking direct physiological grounding limits empirical validation and [...]
A comprehensive dataset on pollinator diversity, visitation rates, individual-based traits, and pollination success across four plant species in an urban garden experiment
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
This dataset presents flower visitation frequency, pollinator richness, and direct measures of pollination success for four focal plant species from a field experiment in 24 home gardens in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. The home gardens were selected to vary independently in local flowering species richness and the proportion of impervious surface in a 500-m radius around the garden, a common [...]
Big bills, small changes: with few exceptions, Jungle crows show minor variation in bill morphology across their distribution
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Examinations of morphology can reveal a species' relationship with the environment and their evolutionary trajectory. Particularly pronounced difference can hint at specific selection pressures, and reveal hitherto unknown species. Cryptic species, with only subtle morphological differences, are widespread and ignoring them risks underestimating biodiversity and their threatened status. Recently [...]