Preprints
There are 3315 Preprints listed.
Oak masting remains stable despite climate warming
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Climate warming alters tree reproduction, but long-term tests of how it affects the large, synchronised interannual fluctuations in seed production known as masting remain rare. Theory predicts that climate-driven declines in masting should be most likely when species combine high reproductive sensitivity to weather cues with rapid climatic change during the corresponding cue windows. We tested [...]
Parasites and forage as determinants of body condition and population size in an imperiled ungulate.
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Parasitology, Population Biology
Rapid environmental changes are resulting in widespread changes in population size, health, and physiology of wildlife, especially at northern latitudes where the impacts of climate change are more pronounced. Barren-ground caribou (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus) have declined across much of their range in recent decades, and while the ultimate causes are unknown, western science and local [...]
Quantitative Metabarcoding for Invertebrate Pest Monitoring and Management
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Agriculture, Entomology, Molecular Genetics
Invertebrate pests are one of the most significant threats to global agriculture. To monitor these pests, invertebrate trapping methods are commonly used to collect a representation of the diversity of pest species present in the ecosystem. Assessing and monitoring such diversity is key to inform pest management strategies, but due to the complexity of bulk trap samples from non-selective [...]
Designing for nature doesn't cost the Earth
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Urban Studies and Planning
1. A key barrier to the development of nature positive cities is the unknown cost of implementing novel urban design elements. Strict budgets and government approval processes make it challenging for developers to trial new approaches, meaning most developments rarely deviate from ‘business-as-usual’ (BAU). Further research is urgently needed to overcome this barrier to innovation and help [...]
Towards comparability among state-and-transition models: A set of generalised templates linked to ecosystem condition
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Growing commitments to environmental sustainability and nature conservation by industry, government and communities globally have led to a pressing need for consistent methods to characterise and quantify outcomes of land use and ecological restoration. State-and-transition models (STMs) are widely used to describe and communicate knowledge about ecosystem dynamics and are increasingly applied in [...]
Expanding the sentinel approach through multimodal integration: resolving underlying ecological processes with eDNA and computer vision
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Sentinel approaches provide a semi-controlled method for quantifying in-field ecological interactions and processes while reducing bias and labour. They are, however, limited by difficulties ascribing taxonomic identities, behavioural context and temporal resolution to interacting agents. The integration of additional sources of data, including the analysis of DNA left behind on sentinel objects [...]
Feeding Ecology and Conservation of the Mediterranean Monk Seal, (Monachus monachus)
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus) is one of the world’s most endangered pinnipeds, persisting as a small number of fragmented populations exposed to continuing anthropogenic pressure. Understanding its feeding ecology is therefore important not only for clarifying its trophic role and habitat use, but also for informing conservation actions related to fisheries overlap, prey [...]
Ecoregion drives intraspecific variation of secondary chemistry in a big sagebrush common garden
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phytochemistry plays an integral role in the health and survival of plants and can mediate community interactions, communication with neighboring plants, protection against disease and herbivores, and attraction of pollinators. We measured non-volatile compounds using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and volatile compounds using gas chromatography (GC) at two different time points [...]
Summarizing Populations: Characterizing the Effects of Sampling in Computational Evolutionary Replay Experiments
Published: 2026-05-19
Subjects: Evolution
When we sample an evolving population, how well do we capture its long-term evolutionary potential? This question underlies the validity of analytical replay experiments, which restart evolution from multiple points in a population’s history to measure how long-term potential changed over time. Analytical replay experiments are becoming increasingly popular in both wet-lab and computational [...]
Reframing the habitat fragmentation debate around the inferential targets predicted by ecological theory
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
The habitat fragmentation debate has persisted for more than three decades because dominant empirical practice has often estimated a narrower quantity than the competing ecological theories jointly require. These frameworks differ not simply in whether fragmentation matters, but in how their predicted effects change along the habitat-amount gradient. The habitat amount hypothesis (HAH) predicts [...]
Centering human cognition in epidemiological models
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Epidemiological models (EMs) have traditionally treated human behavior as static or as a simple function of disease prevalence, limiting their ability to capture disease trajectories such as those observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that infectious disease is fundamentally a coupled human-pathogen system in which cognition and behavior operate on different timescales and must be [...]
Removal and decomposition of fruit respond in opposite ways to canopy cover in a biodiversity experiment
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Trees often produce more fruits than frugivores consume. As a result, many fruits fall to the ground, where they are either secondarily removed by vertebrates, potentially leading to seed dispersal, or they are decomposed by arthropods. Although often neglected, fallen fruits are an important component of forests and contribute to their functioning via these two distinct pathways. While fruit [...]
The Global Biodiversity Framework supports global assessment of One Health actions
Published: 2026-05-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences, Public Health
The One Health approach promotes collaboration across disciplines to enhance the health of humans, animals, plants, and the environment. Recently developed by the Quadripartite organizations, the One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022-2026) supports countries in adopting the One Health approach through six action tracks. The tracks address multiple aspects of biodiversity, containing guiding [...]
Making use of oak genomes
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Genomics, Life Sciences
This review summarizes the contributions of genomics to our understanding of oak evolution and management, both past and ongoing. Far from being exhaustive given the large number of publications following the publication of the genomes, this review emphasizes work conducted in the decade following publication of the first two complete oak genome assemblies, and major findings and achievements [...]
Nature finance: we need (some) offsets
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies
Nature offsets – mechanisms that allow for negative environmental impacts (e.g. biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions) to be fully compensated for and neutralized – are extremely widespread, but have become increasingly controversial, to the extent they are now starting to be precluded from new environmental policy developments. In turn, leaders are becoming more reticent about their [...]