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Preprints

There are 2179 Preprints listed.

Viability selection on coat spot patterns correlates with temperature anomalies in Masai giraffes

Alexia Mouchet, Derek Lee, Monica L Bond, et al.

Published: 2025-03-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology

Remarkable variation in animal colour patterns is often shaped by heterogeneous selection, reflecting adaptation to variable environmental conditions. However, the adaptive functions of patterns and drivers of selection remain poorly understood. Shape and size of colour patterns may help with thermoregulation and thus be altered by temperature anomalies, which are predicted to be more frequent [...]

The decades-long recovery of nocturnal bees in logged forests is counteracted by broad resource range and reliance on pioneers

Ugo Mendes Diniz, Juan Ernesto Guevara-Andino, Gunnar Brehm, et al.

Published: 2025-03-18
Subjects: Life Sciences

Nocturnal bees are elusive pollinators for which little and fragmented evidence of their dietary breadth is available. Moreover, despite their assumed relevance as pollinators of tropical plants, there is no information on how nocturnal bees respond to the loss of suitable habitats and forest succession. Here, we investigated the recovery of Megalopta bees, a prominent group of nocturnal [...]

Citizen science data supports sexual dichromatism but rejects thermal melanism in the European fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra)

Max Mühlenhaupt, Rosalie Hey, Michelle Starp, et al.

Published: 2025-03-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Background Conspicuous color patterns are traditionally believed to advertise the toxicity of prey to potential predators. However, many aposematic species show drastic variation in coloration, indicating the possibility of other functions of coloration. To study these other functions, we can investigate the influence of inherent (e.g., sex) and external factors (e.g., climate) on color [...]

COI metabarcoding with a curated reference database and optimized protocol provides a reliable species-level diversity assessment of tardigrades

Bartłomiej Surmacz, Matteo Vecchi, Diego Fontaneto, et al.

Published: 2025-03-18
Subjects: Zoology

DNA metabarcoding is revolutionizing biodiversity research by providing rapid and efficient ways of collecting species occurrence data. However, it has not yet been effectively applied to many taxonomic groups, mainly due to a significant lack of reference sequences and dedicated protocols. One such group is the tardigrades - a charismatic phylum of microinvertebrates known for their [...]

Predicting interaction frequency in plant-pollinator networks

Carsten F Dormann, William Joel Castillo, María P. Pascual Tudanca, et al.

Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Flowers and their pollinators represent a bipartite interaction system, whose links are hypothesised to be related to species traits. To explore whether we can predict the weight of this link, i.e. the frequency of interactions, in an validation network, we analysed 14 studies of pollinator-flower visitation network from around the world. We used information on species abundances, their traits [...]

Conservation macrogenetics reveals the potential hidden consequences of the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires on Australian biodiversity

Jarrod Sopniewski, Rhiannon Schembri, Craig Moritz, et al.

Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology

The use of genetic analyses has become ubiquitous in conservation planning and management as biodiversity is increasingly threatened globally. Typically, such analyses are employed at the species-level, though as genetic data accrue, it is now possible to consider the genetic composition of multiple species across landscapes. Such macrogenetic perspectives can reveal the potential genetic [...]

On the Repeated Evolution of Parthenogenesis in Stick Insects

Tanja Schwander, Luca Soldini, Romain P Boisseau, et al.

Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Life Sciences

A striking aspect of the biology of stick insects is the widespread occurrence of parthenogenesis, including rare, spontaneous events in sexual species, facultative parthenogenesis as well as obligately parthenogenetic species. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the origins, mechanisms, and evolutionary consequences of parthenogenesis in stick insects, with a particular focus on its [...]

Model-based ordination for phenological studies: from controlling sampling bias to inferring temporal associations

Hao Ran Lai

Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Multivariate Analysis, Statistical Methodology

Willig et al. (Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 15, 868--885, 2024) cautioned that unequal sampling effort and pseudoreplication can bias the characterisation of species phenology using circular statistics. Borrowing concepts from rarefaction, they proposed bootstrapping to control for time-varying marginal totals that arise from unequal sampling effort over time. This study extends their [...]

Validating causal inference in time series models with conditional-independence tests

James T Thorson, Cole C. Monnahan, Lauren A. Rogers

Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Sustainability

Ecologists often use time-series models to approximate dynamics arising from density dependence, species interactions, community synchrony, and other processes. Dynamic structural equation models can represent simultaneous and lagged interactions among variables with missing data, and therefore encompasses a wide family of analyses (linear regression, vector autoregressive models, and dynamic [...]

The Individualized Niche: A Case Study in Scientific Conceptual Change

Katie H. Morrow, Marie I. Kaiser

Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Other Arts and Humanities, Philosophy

We explore the causes and outcomes of scientific conceptual change using a case study of the development of the individualized niche concept. We outline a framework for characterizing conceptual change that distinguishes between epistemically adaptive and neutral processes and outcomes of conceptual change. We then apply this framework in tracing how the individualized niche concept arose [...]

Urban trace metal contamination is negatively associated with condition and wing morphology in a common waterbird

Piotr Minias, Marcin Markowski, Mirosława Słaba, et al.

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Life Sciences

Urban areas suffer from different forms of environmental pollution by light, noise, and chemicals. Pollution by heavy metals has long been associated with industrialization and urbanization processes, increasing the risk of bioaccumulation and compromising the health, condition, and fitness of urban animals. Here, we aimed to investigate the effects of urbanization on bioaccumulation of six heavy [...]

Wing length canalisation and behaviour across birds: a phylogenetic meta-analysis of variance

Klaus Reinhold, Alfredo Sanchez-Tojar

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Life Sciences

Stronger stabilising selection is expected to lead to a decrease in trait variation (i.e., in higher canalisation). We examined this prediction across species by investigating individual variation in wing length across measured as the coefficient of variation (CV). We hypothesised that species that heavily rely on aerial feeding as well as long-distance migratory species should show higher [...]

The human fingerprint of medicinal plant species diversity

Nawal Shrestha, Robbie Hart, David Harrison, et al.

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Anthropology, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biotechnology, Environmental Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures

Medicinal plants have long been crucial to human civilizations, supporting both traditional and modern healthcare systems. However, the processes influencing the global diversity and distribution of medicinal plants remain underexplored. Their diversity, like that of other species groups, is shaped by abiotic and biotic influences, which include, in unique ways, human ecological (including [...]

The Interaction Affinity Between Flowers and Their Pollinators

Zaal Kikvidze

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

The probability of flower fertilization by its pollinator is widely recognized as being influenced by species abundances. However, this relationship has rarely been formalized for the analysis of pollination networks. In this study, I introduce a simple model, adapted from physical chemistry, to formalize this functional dependence. This approach draws upon the well-established biochemical [...]

MYB regulator of ‘colorless’ flavonols underlies the evolution of red flowers in Iochroma (Solanaceae)

Lucas C Wheeler, Maximilian Larter, Stacey D. Smith

Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

Anthocyanins, the pigments that give rise to blue, purple, red and pink colors in many flowers and fruits, are produced by the deeply conserved flavonoid biosynthesis pathway. The regulation of this pathway is thus fundamental for species differences in color across flowering plants, and a growing body of evidence implicates MYB transcription factors as key players activating or suppressing the [...]

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