Preprints
There are 2563 Preprints listed.
Sydney Phylogenetics Workshop: Lessons from the past 15 years
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phylogenetic analysis forms an important component of research in the life sciences, enabling the study of evolutionary relationships, timescales, patterns, and processes. Phylogenetic trees are used in a wide variety of research fields, including molecular ecology, taxonomy and systematics, conservation genetics, and microbiology. Accordingly, there is a strong demand for accessible training in [...]
Changes in pollen production, pollen heteromorphism and ovule production with increased selfing in Viola arvensis
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Plant Biology, Population Biology
Embryos are largely understudied in conservation physiology
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology
Understanding how animals respond to environmental stressors across their life cycle is essential for predicting species’ vulnerability to climate change. Here, we systematically reviewed the literature to quantify the variation in research effort on different life stages in the field of conservation physiology. Specifically, we reviewed experimental studies measuring physiological and [...]
Pleiotropy and the evolutionary stability of plastic phenotypes: a geometric framework
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Phenotypic plasticity allows organisms to express different traits in response to different environmental or genetic conditions. Understanding the evolution of conditional phenotypes is challenging because they are not expressed by all members of a population, which allows for the accumulation of deleterious variation due to drift. Theory suggests pleiotropic effects help prevent the decay of [...]
Moving from the Dilution Effect to Dilution Landscapes: Effects of Natural Vegetation Cover and Fragmentation on Host-parasite Eco-evolutionary Dynamics
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The conversion and fragmentation of natural landscapes are key drivers of biodiversity loss and the erosion of ecosystem services, including disease regulation. Although habitat degradation is linked to higher zoonotic disease risk, the mechanisms by which landscape structure shapes host-parasite eco-evolutionary dynamics remain poorly understood. Here, we combine a spatially explicit [...]
Catalogue of Papilionoidea from Noguera de Albarracín (Teruel, Spain), including new distributional data for the Sierra de Albarracín (Insecta: Lepidoptera)
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Zoology
We present a catalogue of butterflies from Noguera de Albarracín (Teruel, Spain), based on field surveys conducted in 2024 and 2025 within the framework of the Iberozoa Entomology Course. A total of 52 species were recorded, representing 20.15% of the Iberian butterfly fauna. The material belongs to 5 families, 13 subfamilies, 33 genera and 52 species. Lycaenidae was the richest family with 16 [...]
An Exact Coarse-Graining Consistent Metapopulation Model
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Different levels of coarse-graining are of paramount importance to understand how conclusions drawn from local studies can be made general and extrapolated to larger regions. We here investigate how consist metapopulation model are when considering different resolutions of the landscape matrix, i.e. different levels of coarse-graining. A formulation of the metapopulation model, taking into [...]
Causal interpretations can be based on mechanistic knowledge
Published: 2025-08-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. There exists a long-standing disconnect between statistical and mechanistic approaches to the development of causal understanding. Statistical approaches, which have dominated the literature, have focused on the need to obtain perfectly unbiased estimates of causal effects often using either experimental, quasi-experimental, or other methods. Mechanistic approaches have instead focused on [...]
Finding Inter-species Associations on Large Citizen Science Datasets
Published: 2025-08-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
“But I can’t preregister my research”: Improving the reproducibility and transparency of ecology and conservation with adaptive preregistration for model-based research
Published: 2025-08-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
1. Preregistration is an open-science practice which aims to improve research transparency and mitigate questionable research practices, like cherry-picking results. It helps protect against cognitive biases, like hindsight bias, that can influence how study outcomes are interpreted. There has been little uptake of preregistration in ecology and conservation, arguably because existing [...]
Infection profiles in a wild rat–protozoan network are shaped by host traits and environmental factors
Published: 2025-08-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Pathogenic Microbiology
Heterogeneity in parasite infection among hosts shapes transmission dynamics and spillover risk to other host species but remains poorly understood in natural systems. We applied network-based stochastic block modeling and machine learning to a uniquely rich dataset to identify and predict protozoan infection profiles in introduced black rats (Rattus rattus) sampled along an environmental [...]
Parallel concepts and future opportunities across the biological control and invasion sciences
Published: 2025-08-16
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences
The biological control and invasion sciences are long-standing research fields that have accrued enormous fundamental and applied interest. However, their theoretical and practical integration remains in its infancy. Utilizing an expert elicitation process with participants spanning these sciences, we identify conceptual parallels and future opportunities to strengthen links and address future [...]
Associations on land and at sea? A pilot study on the utility of proximity loggers to assess inter-individual relationships in colonial seabirds
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Marine Biology, Ornithology
Accurate and extensive data collection is essential for understanding animal sociality, but collecting associations between individuals remains challenging. Animals often associate and interact outside of the range of an observer, especially in environments such as underwater or underground. However, the development of proximity loggers using Bluetooth and radio frequency to detect associations [...]
Weather conditions are systematically associated with long-range nonroutine movements in a large scavenger
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Zoology
Movement data are valuable for the conservation of Old World vultures, as these move across large distances and experience a wide range of threats. As vultures rely on soaring flight, the interplay of solar radiation, as well as wind direction and strength, is crucial for both short- and long-range movements. However, no study explored the extent to which weather conditions can predict long-range [...]
The SORTEE Guidelines for Data and Code Quality Control in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Open data and code are crucial to increasing transparency and reproducibility, and in building trust in scientific research. However, despite an increasing number of journals in ecology and evolutionary biology mandating for data and code to be archived alongside published articles, the amount and quality of archived data and code, and subsequent reproducibility of results, has remained [...]