Preprints
There are 2755 Preprints listed.
Motif-weighted Structure Alignment for Classification and Evolutionary Studies of Carbonic Anhydrase
Published: 2025-02-24
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Life Sciences
Carbonic anhydrases (CAs) attract interest for their critical roles in various physiological processes and potential application in CO2 sequestration to combat global warming. Despite being an important enzyme family, the classification and evolution of CAs remain elusive due to their high sequence diversity and long evolutionary history. In this paper, the in-silico strategy, Motif-weighted [...]
Quantifying changes in fish population stability using statistical early warnings of regime shifts
Published: 2025-02-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Ecological conservation and management benefits from tools that can foresee impending problems, or those in early stages. Statistical early warnings of regime shifts, which can identify generic changes in system behavior associated with stability loss and potential abrupt changes to a new, distinct state, are theoretically well grounded and have been successfully applied in real-world settings. [...]
HusMorph: A simple machine learning app for automated morphometric landmarking
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biology
Manually obtaining the length and other morphometric features of an animal can be time- consuming, and consistent measurements are challenging with large datasets. By leveraging high-throughput computing power and machine learning-based computer vision, such phenotypic data can be rapidly collected with high accuracy. Here we present HusMorph, a novel application with a simple and intuitive [...]
Prior land use shapes the functional composition of tree-seedling communities along a tropical forest chronosequence
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Biology, Forest Biology, Plant Biology
Tropical rainforests are highly threatened by deforestation, yet they have the potential to regrow naturally when left abandoned. To understand natural recruitment, it is essential to explore the recovery of tree-seedlings and their traits within the community assembly of secondary forests. Here, we studied the taxonomic and functional diversity as well as the composition of tree seedling [...]
Functional assisted migration to sustain ecosystem functions under climate change
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Climate change is rapidly altering habitats, forcing many plant species to shift their distribution. However, slow dispersal rates and habitat fragmentation hinder their ability to track these changes, risking local extinctions and reduced ecosystem functioning. Current management strategies may not suffice to address these challenges. 2. We propose functional assisted migration (FAM) as a [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Warm Temperate Southwestern Atlantic
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Warm Temperate Southwestern Atlantic is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Rio Grande and Southeastern Brazil. The mapped extent of mangroves in 2020 was 709.5 km2, representing 0.5% of the global mangrove area. The biota is characterized by three species of true mangroves, Rhizophora mangle, [...]
Genetic diversity is key to a nature-positive future
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
1. Nature-positive describes the concept of halting and then reversing the loss of biodiversity in a manner that is equitable to all, particularly indigenous peoples and local communities. 2. Genetic diversity is the foundational component of biodiversity, underpinning species and ecosystem diversity. Genetic diversity is vital to resilience and ecosystem services. While genetic diversity was [...]
Breaking Barriers: Dualistic Thinking in Religious and Social Contexts and its Environmental Impact
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Breaking Barriers: Dualistic Thinking in Religious and Social Contexts and its environmental impact explores the intricate relationship between dualistic thinking, influenced by religious and societal norms, and its role in perpetuating environmental degradation. Through an interdisciplinary analysis spanning history and philosophy, it investigates how entrenched dualistic frameworks, such as [...]
Mitonuclear divergence predicts gradual speciation in animal hybrid zones
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
The core of speciation is the genetic incompatibilities underlying the evolution of reproductive isolation. Hybrid zones provide unique opportunities to unravel the evolutionary rate of reproductive isolation in the origin of species. The selection against hybrids accrues with increased genetic incompatibilities and drives the evolution of reproductive isolation in the face of gene flow. There [...]
Projected climate change scenarios spatially decouple desert EFN-ant mutualisms
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Aim: Climate change is changing species distributions globally, but predicting these impacts on assemblages and their spatial overlaps under future scenarios is an ongoing challenge. Here, we explore how climate change influences distributions among two mutualistic assemblages. Location: The Mojave and Colorado Deserts, California, United States Methods: We developed stacked species distribution [...]
Genome of Melody: Applying bioinformatics to study the evolution of Gregorian chant
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures
Gregorian chant was a central musical tradition in Medieval Latin Europe and one of the expressions of its cultural unity: any Latin Christian liturgy, such as the weekly Sunday mass, would have involved Gregorian chant as a major part of the prescribed ritual. The Gregorian legend of chant melodies’ divine origin required the practitioners to conserve them, to the extent that this requirement [...]
estar: An R package to measure ecological stability
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Assessing ecological stability across populations or communities is a prime goal in biodiversity monitoring and conservation research. Quantifying stability is not trivial because its different aspects can be measured with various metrics. However, to date, no software enables measuring different stability metrics on ecological time-series data. 2. We present the estar R package that [...]
Repeated mitochondrial capture with limited genomic introgression in a lizard group
Published: 2025-02-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Mitochondrial introgression is common among animals and is often first identified through mitonuclear discordance — discrepancies between evolutionary relationships inferred from mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and nuclear DNA (nuDNA). Over recent decades, genomic data have also revealed extensive nuclear introgression in many animal groups, with implications for genetic and phenotypic diversity. [...]
Climate change intensifies plant-pollinator mismatch and increases secondary extinction risk for plants in northern latitudes
Published: 2025-02-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Climate change is altering the timing of species’ life-cycle events (i.e., phenology), but the rates of phenological shifts vary across taxa. These mismatches in phenological response may disrupt interactions between interdependent species, such as plants and their pollinators, which may lead to reduced plant reproduction via pollen limitation and contribute to secondary extinction risks for [...]
High-resolution habitat suitability maps for all widespread Italian breeding bird species
Published: 2025-02-18
Subjects: Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Tackling the current global biodiversity crisis requires spatially accurate biodiversity data to rapidly assess knowledge gaps and set conservation priorities. Obtaining accurate data across large spatial scales is often challenging, due to the massive logistical and economic requirements of large-scale surveys. Here, we provide high-resolution (0.81 to 81 km², depending on species ecology) [...]