Preprints
There are 2283 Preprints listed.
Facing the heat: behavioral and molecular underpinnings of climate hardiness in bumblebees
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Behavioral Neurobiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Climate change heralds an era of increased heat waves, with an estimated 20-30 additional high heat days per year. While climate change is upon us, we still have little understanding of the organismal impacts of high heat and how to combat them. Insects, due to their short generation times and their sensitive ecological requirements, offer a powerful model for studying rapid physiological and [...]
Seeking to quantify contributions that fisheries operations can make to a global Nature Positive goal
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Marine Biology
Amidst global efforts to address biodiversity loss, the concept of ‘Nature Positive’ has gained traction as a societal goal aligned with the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). While the goal is increasingly being embraced by businesses and governments, there has been little investigation into how fisheries, a key sector in the global economy and a major driver of marine biodiversity loss, could [...]
Decline of the globally rare old-growth specklebelly lichen, Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis, and its implications for temperate rainforest conservation
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology
Epiphytic lichens are key components of temperate rainforests, where they contribute to forest hydrology, nutrient cycles, food webs, and overall biomass and biodiversity. Despite their ecological importance and sensitivity to environmental change few protections exist for lichen conservation and management. Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis, or old-growth specklebelly lichen, is considered an [...]
Code review in practice: A checklist for computational reproducibility and collaborative research in ecology and evolution
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Ensuring that research, along with its data and code, is credible and remains accessible is crucial for advancing scientific knowledge—especially in ecology and evolutionary biology, where the climate crisis and biodiversity loss accelerate and demand urgent, transparent science. Yet, code is rarely shared alongside scientific publications, and when it is, unclear implementation and insufficient [...]
Foliar spectral signatures reveal adaptive divergence in live oaks (Quercus section Virentes) across species and environmental niches
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Genomic tools have transformed our understanding of species and population genetic structure in landscapes. However, discerning the impacts of neutral and adaptive evolutionary forces remains challenging, largely due to the scarcity of tools capable of measuring a broad spectrum of phenotypic traits. We used spectroscopic data from preserved leaves to test for adaptive divergence among [...]
Large female northern pike (Esox lucius) do not connect spawning areas across a lagoon network in the southern Baltic Sea
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Exceptionally large individuals may serve as keystone connectors among subpopulations and habitats, a role recently demonstrated in large Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in Norway. To examine whether this pattern extends to other coastal fish species, we analysed capture-mark-recapture data for over 5,800 coastal northern pike (Esox lucius) and acoustic tracking data from 317 pike individuals, using [...]
The case for octopus sentience: a follow-up to Simone’s “Are octopuses sentient beings?”
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Recently, a paper published in a Brazilian malacology online journal argued against the existence of sentience in octopuses based on disputable arguments – the presence of cannibalistic behavior, absence of sociality and parental care, short lives, size and complexity of the nervous system and intelligence. This response discusses a different perspective on the issue of octopus sentience, [...]
Understanding niche conformance in fire salamander larvae: Insights from reciprocal transplant experiments
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Life Sciences, Zoology
Amphibians are in particular vulnerable to (climatic) changes in their habitat as they are highly dependent on precipitation and temperature. The larval stage can be considered the most critical life stage in the ontogeny of most amphibians as predation is very high, and larvae are restricted to their natal aquatic habitat. The same applies for larvae of the fire salamander (Salamandra [...]
MUSEUMS SHOULD CURATE BEYOND THE NATURAL: DOMESTIC BREEDS OFFER UNIQUE INSIGHT INTO EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES & HUMAN CULTURE
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences
This short communication proposes that natural history museums should consider expanding their mission by intensively collecting and curating domesticated, hemerophilic, and genetically engineered animals, plants, and fungi to improve the study of evolutionary biology and anthropology, as well as mitigate against future climatic and economic challenges.
Designing Multi-Modal Ecosystem Monitoring Technologies: A Network of Networks Approach
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Software Engineering
The central promise of ecosystem monitoring technologies — like bioacoustic, camera trap, citizen science, eDNA, and satellite data — is to reveal changes in the structure and composition of the Earth’s ecological systems to facilitate timely and effective conservation action. Following the evolution and maturation of these technology systems, the fusion of multimodal observation systems — where [...]
Improving landscape fire frequency estimates by integrating public land fire data and satellite imagery
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Background Contemporary fire regimes are changing rapidly, and effective fire management requires knowledge of fire history, often derived from satellite imagery. Satellites, however, are not well suited to detecting low intensity fires, meaning fire history data are often inaccurate. Aims We aimed to improve satellite fire frequency estimates by incorporating data from fire history on public [...]
Key Biodiversity Areas and Important Plant Areas can help build ecologically representative Protected and Conserved Area networks to meet 30-by-30
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Expanding the global network of Protected and Conserved Areas (PCAs) to cover 30% of the planet by 2030 (30-by-30) is mandated in the Global Biodiversity Framework. However, if PCA expansion is undertaken hastily, it risks inadvertently overlooking important species or ecosystems and entrenching existing spatial and taxonomic biases. We investigate, across 28 countries, whether sites identified [...]
Leveraging large language models for ecological interpretation using an eBird chatbot case study
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. The anthropocene presents significant challenges for global biodiversity, public health, and long-term ecosystem stability. The wealth of publicly available near-real-time ecology and climate data can be used to monitor these challenges and allow practitioners to develop mitigation strategies. 2. There is untapped potential to apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to quantitative ecological and [...]
Short reproductive periods dominate mast seeding across diverse tree species
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Biology
Mast seeding, synchronous and highly variable reproduction among perennial plants, profoundly impacts ecosystem dynamics and species interactions. However, the extent of periodicity in mast seeding, defined as cyclical but not strictly regular intervals between reproduction, remains poorly understood, including how it varies across and within species. Here, we used autoregressive analyses on seed [...]
Balancing Accessibility and Security: Safeguarding Citizen-Sourced Biodiversity Data in the Age of AI and Open-Sourced Software
Published: 2025-04-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and open-source software are revolutionizing biodiversity monitoring by democratizing access to citizen-science datasets. While these advancements facilitate conservation efforts and scientific research, they pose significant risks for data misuse. Researchers who reduce barriers to accessing such biodiversity datasets are responsible for safeguarding sensitive data.