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Preprints

There are 2173 Preprints listed.

On the Repeated Evolution of Parthenogenesis in Stick Insects

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

Published: 2025-03-18
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: 2025-03-18
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: 2025-03-18
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: 2025-03-15
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: 2025-03-15
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: 2025-03-15
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 [...]

Flavonol-regulating MYB underlies the evolution of red flowers in Iochroma (Solanaceae)

Lucas C Wheeler, Maximilian Larter, Stacey D. Smith

Published: 2025-03-14
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 [...]

Micro- and nanoplastic effects on the reproduction of Daphnia spp. - a meta-analysis

Ana Leticia Antonio Vital, Luca Liprandi, Christian Laforsch, et al.

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Life Sciences

Several traits of micro- and nanoplastic particles (MNPs), including among others, polymer type, size, and shape, have been shown to influence MNP toxicity. The direction and size of these moderating effects are however often unclear and generalizations from single studies are difficult to establish. Meta-analyses, which quantitatively aggregate data on a specific topic, can be used to increase [...]

Extremely low primary production after a decade long drought contributed to the local extinction of a group-living rodent

Annemarie van der Marel, Madan K Oli, Azad Hossain, et al.

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Some species exhibit physiological and behavioral plasticity to survive adverse periods, such as changing climates or reduced food availability. Yet, during extreme climatic events the mechanisms to respond to these adverse periods may not be sufficient, potentially driving local population extinctions. We studied the population dynamics of a common degu (Octodon degus) population in central [...]

Inferring reproductive phenology and success from proportions of juveniles in population monitoring

Paul Cuchot, Luis-Miguel Chevin

Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Ornithology, Statistical Methodology

1. Phenological shifts caused by climate change are increasingly documented in wild populations by the widespread collection of datasets on reproductive timing and success. These phenological events are often inferred by examining changes in population abundance and age structure throughout the breeding season. However, the quantitative relationship between the observed proportion of juveniles [...]

Evolvability in vertebrate segmentation

James Hammond, Callum V Bucklow, Berta Verd

Published: 2025-03-12
Subjects: Life Sciences

The number of vertebrae in the axial skeleton of vertebrates is extremely diverse, and reflects adaptations to a diverse range of habitats and lifestyles. The capacity for heritable evolutionary change in the number of vertebrae - its evolvability - is underpinned by the process of somitogenesis, which determines the number of somites that form in the early embryo. However, despite the [...]

Measuring natural selection on the transcriptome

John R Stinchcombe, John K. Kelly

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Other Genetics and Genomics

The level and pattern of gene expression is increasingly recognized as a principal determinant of plant phenotypes and thus of fitness. The estimation of natural selection on the transcriptome is an emerging research discipline. We here review recent progress and consider the challenges posed by the high dimensionality of the transcriptome for the multiple regression methods routinely used to [...]

Socioecology and the role of scramble competition

Andreas Berghänel, Sarah Marshall, Friederike Range

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology

Ecological explanations for social organization and behavior are central to behavioral ecology. Unfortunately, the continuing mismatch between theoretical predictions and some empirical data led to increasingly complex hypotheses with numerous factors, raising doubts about their predictive value or even falsifiability. Moreover, several taxon-specific socioecological hypotheses have been [...]

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