Preprints
There are 2692 Preprints listed.
Rebuilding Diversity in the Anthropocene
Published: 2025-10-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Rapid changes driven by the Anthropocene—including shifts in climate, nutrients, habitats, and species composition—are causing severe biodiversity loss while creating new ecological opportunities. The balance between short-term ecological shifts in realized niches and long-term evolutionary changes in fundamental niches determines diversification. In the Anthropocene, however, this balance is [...]
Invasive mosquitofish become more aggressive in the presence of native pike young-of-year: implications for native predator recruitment
Published: 2025-10-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Invasive species often exhibit aggressive behaviour, boldness, and high foraging activity, which contribute to their establishment success and impact on native ecosystems. The mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki), one of the world’s most invasive fish species, is known for its aggressive nature, which threatens the survival of native species. Lake littoral zones, critical for juvenile fish [...]
The True Cost of the Chip: Connecting AI’s Unchecked Growth to Land Use, Water Rights, and Indigenous Sovereignty in Chile’s Lithium Triangle
Published: 2025-10-14
Subjects: Business, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The exponential growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is driving an “AI Mineral Rush” for hardware materials like lithium, essential for data center batteries. However, lithium extraction imposes immense, often obscured, environmental and social costs. This paper investigates these externalities in Chile’s Salar de Atacama, a core region of the “Lithium Triangle.” We connect global AI demand to [...]
A Modern Reanalysis of McManus’ Genetic Model of Handedness
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We replicate and critically evaluate McManus’ (1985) single-locus genetic model of handedness, which remains influential in laterality research. Using the original familial and twin datasets, we reproduce McManus’ parameter estimates while correcting reporting errors and miscalculations. Our reproduction confirms that the model is reproducible but reveals sensitivity to dataset inconsistencies [...]
Highly conserved regulators of environmental sensing and adaptation drive domestication in gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata)
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Domestication in fish involves rapid and complex changes in life-history, physiology and behaviour under human-controlled conditions. In gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata), a species with a relatively recent domestication history, we used genome-wide population comparisons to show that domestication targets a core set of highly conserved regulators of environmental sensing mechanisms. Across [...]
Ecotoxicological perspectives of microplastics
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Plastic pollution has been in discussion from last few decades. However, in the recent days, microplastic (MP) contamination has become an additional issue of concern for ecotoxicologists as extensive research on MP toxicity revealed serious effects on the environment, chronically. Global data on the production and usage of plastic compounds, demonstrated a steady exponential increasing pattern [...]
Landscape heterogeneity moderates temporal changes in floral resource diversity
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Floral resource diversity supports pollination function and is increasingly threatened by global environmental change. Using long-term data on native insect-pollinated plants across 200 landscapes in southern Sweden, we assessed changes in taxonomic and functional diversity over 26 years in relation to land cover heterogeneity. Species richness declined significantly, while the three functional [...]
From pipeline to network: redefining scientific success
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
The traditional pipeline view of academia no longer reflects the reality of scientific careers. Reframing success as a network of paths recognizes excellence in its many forms, fostering a more inclusive, resilient, and socially engaged research culture.
Jurassic Park @ 35: Reflections on evolutionary genetics, de-extinction, and the science-society interface
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
On the 35th anniversary of the release of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, I reflect on both technical and cultural themes of the novel that resonate in the current moment. First, I offer a concise review of three evolutionary concepts—plasticity, pleiotropy, and epistasis—that complicate our efforts to engineer organisms with desirable phenotypes. I show how these ideas play out in the [...]
The relative roles of in situ diversification and lineage dispersal underlying diversity patterns at the assemblage level
Published: 2025-10-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Speciation, extinction, and dispersal are the historical processes influencing the spatial distribution of lineages and strongly influence diversity patterns. Here, we apply a recently developed methodological approach to quantify the relative legacies in situ diversification history (i.e. diversification occurring in the biogeographical region) and historical dispersal (inferred from ex-situ [...]
Understanding the socio-ecological system (SES) of Arctic Reindeer husbandry
Published: 2025-10-09
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Arctic reindeer husbandry is a socio-ecological system (SES) of vital regional significance that is naturally connected to the cultural heritage, spiritual identity, and food security of Indigenous peoples throughout the Circumpolar North. This review integrates the multifaceted challenges and adaptive strategies of this complex adaptive system (CAS), which is increasingly exposed to accelerating [...]
Beyond distribution: environmental justice challenges of Indigenous communities across the Circumpolar North
Published: 2025-10-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The Circumpolar North is warming at an unprecedented pace, accelerating entrenched environmental injustices against Indigenous peoples. Although the disproportionate distribution of these harms is paramount, in this review, we contend that an exclusive emphasis on distribution is analytically inadequate. An inclusive multidimensional framework of environmental justice has been introduced that [...]
Complete de novo assembly of Wolbachia endosymbiont of contemporary Drosophila simulans using long-read genome sequencing.
Published: 2025-10-09
Subjects: Evolution, Genomics
We present a contemporary high-quality, complete de novo assembly of Wolbachia pipientis (wRi Merrill 23, CP199298), an alphaproteobacterial endosymbiont of Drosophila simulans. This assembly was generated using long read sequencing of wRi-infected D. simulans embryos collected from the Merrill College at the University of California, Santa Cruz in October 2023.
Legumes of the Koffler Scientific Reserve and Their Rhizobia
Published: 2025-10-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
In this document, we have consolidated information on the legumes of the Koffler Scientific Reserve (KSR, the University of Toronto’s biological research station, 44° 01' N, 79° 31' W; King Township, ON, Canada) and their associated rhizobia. The list of associated rhizobia was originally compiled in 2020 by J. Wang under the supervision of J.R. Stinchcombe, J.A. Boyle, and T.L. Harrison, and [...]
Monitoring ecosystem services requires a redesign of siloed monitoring programmes
Published: 2025-10-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Monitoring ecosystem services is essential for achieving sustainability and biodiversity goals, yet existing monitoring programmes are fragmented, siloed, and not designed to detect or attribute change in ecosystem services. 2. We applied the Essential Ecosystem Service Variables (EESV) framework within a social-ecological network model to integrate three decades of ecological, economic, and [...]