Preprints
There are 3699 Preprints listed.
Beyond caveat emptor: reducing nitrous oxide risk in the soil carbon offset market
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Soil organic carbon (SOC) storage projects are an increasingly prominent natural climate solution, drawing investment from diverse climate-sensitive stakeholders. However, the OC additions that build SOC can alter emissions of the potent greenhouse gas (GHG) nitrous oxide (N2O). These emission changes can erode the intended GHG benefit when OC inputs fuel spatiotemporally episodic hot spots and [...]
Suction or filter feeder? Morphology supports a combined feeding mechanism in the Little Auk (Alle alle)
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences, Ornithology
Little Auks (Alle alle) are the most abundant seabird in the Arctic, with their largest colonies in north-west Greenland sustained by foraging nearly exclusively on plankton. Given their high metabolic demands, adults must capture an approximate 60,000 copepods per day, raising long-standing questions about how this can be achieved efficiently, and with this, questions about the anatomical basis [...]
Time-lagged responses of soil biota are pervasive and require new approaches
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
When land-use changes, soil biodiversity is typically assumed to respond immediately. Nonetheless, soils are inherently slow systems. We argue that soil communities often remain in a transient state for decades to centuries, generating persistent ecological legacies. These lags can arise through two interacting mechanisms: environmental inertia, as the physical and chemical properties of soils [...]
Density-dependent body-size distributions reveal populations state relative to carrying capacity
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phenotypic traits may provide accessible information about population dynamics, but how population-level trait distributions change along density-dependent trajectories remains poorly understood in populations with complex life cycles. Here, we quantified body-size distributions in three experimental populations of the bulb mite (Rhizoglyphus robini) as they increased from low density towards [...]
Allee effects in corals during fertilisation
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Allee effects – where individual fitness declines at low population densities or sizes – are pivotal in shaping the reproductive ecology of broadcast-spawning corals. In these species, successful external fertilisation requires that gametes remain at sufficiently high concentrations for long enough periods before turbulent water movement disperses them below fertilisable levels. As reefs degrade [...]
Chromosome-number diversity and evolution in Nitrariaceae: a critical synthesis of cytological, genome-size and genomic evidence
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Chromosome-number data in Nitrariaceae are dispersed across historical cytological reports, regional compilations and recent flow-cytometric and genomic studies, and their biological interpretation is complicated by uneven sampling, taxonomic change and somatic chromosome-number variation. We critically synthesised chromosome-related evidence for the family using ChromoDB as the principal [...]
Scenario-dependent functional connectivity in a crowded seascape: habitat suitability, shipping pressure and marine infrastructure in the North Sea
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Marine spatial planning increasingly needs seascape connectivity evidence to balance biodiversity conservation, offshore energy development and shipping. However, predicted functional connectivity depends strongly on how habitat suitability and human-use pressures are translated into resistance surfaces. This study tested how shipping and marine infrastructure alter HSM-derived connectivity [...]
Plasticity and subfertility at the evolution of eusociality: an empirical test of the evolution of role specialisation
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
At the origin of eusociality, some individuals (workers) gave up reproducing to help another individual (queen) raise their offspring. In Hymenoptera, females are just as related to their siblings as they are to their own offspring meaning only a small benefit of role specialisation is required for selection to favour this strategy. However, it is yet to be established what conditions promoted [...]
A curated bioacoustics dataset of European bat vocalizations
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Acoustic surveys represent the primary method for monitoring bat populations and assessing their habitat use, yet reference recordings and associated metadata remain fragmented across repositories, recording programs, and private collections. We present ChirosetEurope, a curated dataset of European bat vocalizations (echolocation and social calls) assembled from multiple open repositories and [...]
Comparing space use behavior and aviary-based exploration measures in a species rapidly expanding its geographic range
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Species range expansions could be facilitated by consistent behavioral differences between individuals on the range edge relative to those in other parts of the range. Movement behaviors in particular are thought to be important for expanding and invasive species. There is evidence for a relationship between consistent individual differences in exploratory behavior and dispersal (the permanent [...]
Regional spatial synchrony in density-dependent survival of a woodland passerine
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Spatial population synchrony, the tendency of geographically separated populations to fluctuate in concert, reduces opportunities for demographic rescue and increases extinction risk, yet the demographic processes underlying it remain poorly understood. Adult survival is a key driver of population dynamics but few studies have quantified its spatial synchrony or identified the mechanisms [...]
The Principle of Natural Selection and its Laws of Reproduction and Speciation: A Formal Framework for Reproductive Architecture and Ancestry
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
This paper presents a formal framework for reproductive architecture and ancestry across reproductive modes and speciation. Natural selection is defined as the generational propagation of heritable characteristics through varying inclusions and exclusions; characteristics that are not heritable do not propagate. A single general expression states one generational cycle: an inherited ancestry [...]
Invertebrates in the Diet of Greater Sage-grouse: A Systematic Map
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urphasianus) are considered an umbrella species for the sagebrush-steppe ecosystem. Conservation efforts have been made to protect this species as they have neared Endangered Species status. Protecting the many aspects of their habitat has been crucial to protecting the species, and understanding and protecting their food sources is a critical tool in supporting [...]
The reported decline in bird diversity tracks birdwatching effort, not birds
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A recent analysis in Science links a photovoltaic policy-stringency index to citizen-science bird records aggregated to county-months and concludes that China’s solar-expansion policy reduced Shannon diversity by 2.10% per standard deviation of stringency. Reproducing that estimate exactly from the replication package and checking its inputs against record-level data from the same platform, we [...]
Urban densification reduces food-web robustness despite partial gains through local habitat improvements
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Biodiversity
Urban densification is widely promoted to curb sprawl, yet the replacement of existing green infrastructure threatens species across multiple trophic levels. Species are embedded in complex food webs, and understanding how densification restructures urban food webs is essential for predicting functional change and evaluating whether local habitat improvements (e.g. greater vegetation diversity) [...]