Preprints
There are 3057 Preprints listed.
Fear on the Landscape: How human activity shapes wildlife habitat use in protected areas in Tasmania
Published: 2026-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
The growing enthusiasm for outdoor recreation has prompted questions about the effects of different forms of human activity on the habitat use of both predators and prey. Here, we used time-to-event camera trap data from a large-scale survey in Tasmanian protected areas to investigate the influence of motorised (vehicles) and non-motorised (hikers, joggers, and cyclists) recreation on wildlife [...]
Long-lasting negative effects of poor early life conditions on cognitive performance in adulthood in a wild bird
Published: 2026-03-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Nutrition, Ornithology
Adverse conditions encountered during growth, such as stress or malnutrition, are known to affect cognitive development and functions in adulthood in humans and laboratory animals. However, how early life conditions can influence adult cognition in wild animals remains unclear. Yet cognitive abilities such as innovation can be crucial for animals to cope with rapidly changing environments. We [...]
Differential gene expression between urban and rural acorn ant populations
Published: 2026-03-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
The acorn ant, Temnothorax curvispinosus, is a model system for rapid evolution of physiological traits to urban environments. Here, we performed a transcriptome-wide comparison of changes in gene expression between urban and rural populations of acorn ants in the southeastern United States. Our analyses revealed 287 differentially expressed genes. Overrepresentation in gene ontology terms was [...]
Echo-dash: Keeping ecologists in the loop with an open source, online ecoacoustic dashboard for interactive exploration of spatiotemporal soundscape data
Published: 2026-03-08
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Population Biology, Software Engineering, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is being adopted in a range of contexts. Emerging methods facilitate analysis of large-scale data sets, but ecological interpretation of acoustic indices is not straightforward. In addition, the technical and logistical requirements of using emerging AI methods for big data mean that conservation actors increasingly adopt third-party analysis solutions. We argue [...]
Coexistence Nexus in practice: integrating One Health into the food-biodiversity challenge in Central America
Published: 2026-03-08
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
Reconciling biodiversity conservation, food security, and human health remains a major sustainability challenge, largely because these dimensions are often examined in isolation. Here, we present an integrated analytical framework that extends coexistence theory by explicitly incorporating zoonotic emergence within a One Health perspective. Using Central America as a case study, we combine [...]
Drivers of community structure and habitat suitability in ponds of the New Caledonia biodiversity hotspot
Published: 2026-03-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite being present on all continents including Antarctica, ponds remain an understudied freshwater ecosystem. Ponds are particularly diverse in their physicochemical characteristics which is reflected in the biological assemblages inhabiting them. On the New Caledonia archipelago, acknowledged to be a global biodiversity hotspot, lentic freshwater habitats are numerous. The archipelago is [...]
Data- and code-archiving in the British Ecological Society journals: present status and recommendations for future improvements
Published: 2026-03-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Data- and code-archiving are important components of open science, as both make research more transparent, reproducible, accountable, and credible, allowing future researchers to identify errors and build on previous work. Despite progress in implementing data- and code-archiving policies in journals publishing ecology and evolution research, issues remain. To be more useful to future [...]
Abiotic constraints and recreational rock climbing shape cliff vegetation in Freyr, Belgium
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aim: Cliff ecosystems support diverse vascular plant communities due to high abiotic heterogeneity and their historical role as climatic refugia. However, cliffs are increasingly exposed to disturbances from recreational rock climbing. The ecological effects of climbing likely depend on abiotic cliff characteristics—such as slope, aspect, and microtopography—but these context-dependent [...]
Call for a paradigm shift from statistical causal inference to multi-evidence causal investigation
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Explicit discussions of causal methods have long fallen into the domain of statistics. Scientists have instead pursued mechanistic knowledge as an alternative approach to causal understanding. In the past two decades, a body of literature has developed that constitutes a statistical causal inference paradigm based on restrictive assumptions that fail to respect mechanistic knowledge. Recent [...]
Seven principles for engaging schools with nature: pooling the expertise of teachers and nature educators
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Education, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations
Nature connection in schools can address several issues faced in both environmental and educational fields. However, guidance is limited and many aspects can feel daunting or risky for schools under multiple other constraints. As a group of researchers, schoolteachers, and nature educators, we have co-produced seven guiding principles for integrating nature within UK schooling, particularly in [...]
Island species as models for small population biology and conservation
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Islands provide unparalleled natural laboratories for understanding how small, isolated populations persist and evolve. Our synthesis of island population studies reveals that 50–70% report effective population sizes below 100, yet many taxa have sustained such small populations for millions of years. Strikingly, only 4% and 27% of studies examined genetic load and genomic diversity, exposing [...]
Towards ecologically meaningful foundation models
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ecology aims to explain and predict how organisms interact with each other and their environments across space and time. Yet both ecological data and theory are fragmented, leading to models that generalise poorly beyond specific systems or scales. Empirical evidence spans diverse modalities, resolutions and contexts, while theory is distributed across partially overlapping frameworks that are [...]
Thermal filtering reveals a cryptic reservoir of thermotolerant yeasts in Sub-Antarctic soils
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Global climate change is accelerating ecological transformation in Sub-Antarctic ecosystems, where resident biota exhibit narrow thermal tolerances. While microbial responses to warming are increasingly documented, the role of soil yeasts, key players in organic matter decomposition, remains poorly understood. Here, we show that warming acts as a deterministic filter, triggering a profound [...]
Disease-associated aggregation of Dactylopleustes yoshimurai on sea urchins: host-level and lesion-level processes
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Marine Biology
Amphipods of the genus Dactylopleustes are specialized symbionts of sea urchins, and in some species aggregations on host lesions have been reported; however, the behavioural mechanisms underlying such lesion-associated aggregation remain poorly understood. We investigated host-level and within-host processes underlying lesion aggregation in the symbiotic amphipod Dactylopleustes yoshimurai on [...]
Between Interface and Truth: Multi-Task Selection Drives Ecologically Veridical Perception
Published: 2026-03-05
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Biostatistics, Cognitive Neuroscience, Evolution
When does optimisation for performance yield representations that track world structure? We develop a mathematical theory of agents with a single fixed encoding shared across tasks, and use it to resolve the broader debate over whether selection favors fitness-tuned interfaces or veridical perception. Selection favors ecological veridicality: preserving exactly those world-state distinctions [...]