Preprints
There are 3743 Preprints listed.
As invasions slow down, biosecurity must move inward
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies
Rates of non-native-species first records and establishment are slowing. This is encouraging, but it changes rather than resolves the biosecurity problem imposed by biological invasions. As external establishments decline while national non-native-species pools remain compositionally distinct, a growing share of remaining invasion opportunity should lie in redistribution among connected [...]
Stomatal responses of herbaceous plants to climate change since the 1800s: A case study using herbarium specimens
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Background and Aims: As climate change accelerates, plants are expected to respond in myriad ways, such as shifting phenology or altering the density or size of stomata. Nonetheless, most studies to date have focused on just a single facet at a time. Methods: Here, we used herbarium specimens to examine stomatal responses to climate change in two perennial herbaceous species that have not [...]
Migration of the Aquatic Warbler Acrocephalus paludicola through Morocco: historical records and new evidence from Atlantic coastal wetlands
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The Aquatic Warbler Acrocephalus paludicola is a globally threatened long-distance migrant whose occurrence in Morocco remains poorly documented, particularly during post-breeding migration. Historical records document both pre- and post-breeding migration through Morocco, although only nine post-breeding records were reported before 2000, with subsequent targeted surveys resulting in the capture [...]
mycoBaseCL: un catálogo actualizado de los hongos de Chile
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
El Reino Fungi constituye un grupo taxonómico megadiverso cuyas múltiples funciones ecosistémicas tienen repercusiones directas sobre el bienestar y desarrollo humano. Las bases de datos de biodiversidad resuelven la fragmentación de la información, existiendo en el contexto local compendios históricos sobre hongos de Chile desarrollados previamente. En los compendios de datos referidos se [...]
Audio embeddings identify novel sounds and track soundscape change within a tropical restoration landscape
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is increasingly being used over conventional biodiversity surveys because it is more cost-effective and implementable at a landscape level. However, the cheaper sensors that removed the barriers to PAM have now shifted the challenge from data collection to interpretation. Acoustic indices address this by condensing each recording into single summary statistics, [...]
Solar parks as an opportunity to jointly advance climate-change mitigation and biodiversity conservation
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations
Anthropogenic climate change is among the most pressing challenges for humanity making carbon-neutral energy production a top priority. Across the globe, solar energy is the single fastest growing energy source with solar parks covering more and more land surface area across many continents. The rise in solar energy production affects terrestrial biodiversity in the areas now occupied by solar [...]
Post-dispersal seed predation reflects tree species occurrence beyond local neighborhoods in a forest biodiversity experiment
Published: 2026-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences
Post-dispersal seed predation is a key mechanism underlying Janzen-Connell (JC) effects with seed predation expected to decline with increasing distance from conspecific trees. However, the spatial scale at which seed predators respond to the occurrence of their resource tree species remains poorly understood. In particular, mobile consumers may respond to resource distributions beyond the local [...]
Disentangling trait and phylogenetic signals in species co-occurrence: a Bayesian dyadic regression approach
Published: 2026-09-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim: Understanding the factors shaping species co-occurrence is a central objective in ecology. Progress is hindered by correlations among species traits and phylogenetic relationships, which confound each other’s signals. Regression-based approaches hold promise to ameliorate this issue, but the current toolkit lacks methods that combine suitable likelihoods for co-occurrence data with latent [...]
Evolution of frugivory across a large radiation of non-seed-dispersing animals
Published: 2026-09-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
The origin of Angiosperm fleshy fruits, a novel nutritious resource, has led to the evolution of frugivory in a wide range of animals. While the (co)evolutionary dynamics between fruits and seed dispersers has received much attention, the evolution of frugivory in non-seed-dispersing animals remains overlooked. Here, we elucidate the macroevolution of frugivory in a large radiation of an insect, [...]
Trait-based functional indices reveal contrasting carbon-storage and biodiversity-support potential across urban tree species and parks in Bogotá
Published: 2026-09-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Urban expansion increasingly challenges the capacity of cities to maintain ecological functions, while urban trees are expected to contribute to climate regulation and biodiversity conservation. However, urban forest management often lacks functionally explicit information linking species characteristics to their ecological potential and spatial variation across urban green spaces. Here, we [...]
Does tolerance to fast warming predict tolerance to slow warming in fishes?
Published: 2026-09-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Critical thermal maximum (CTmax) is widely used to quantify upper thermal limits in fishes, but its ecological relevance has been questioned because standard protocols use fast warming rates (0.3°C min-¹; 18°C h-¹) that rarely occur in nature, where thermal stress more typically unfolds over hours to days. Whether CTmax under fast warming predicts warming tolerance to slower, ecologically [...]
Climate-associated genomic differentiation in Lemmon’s willow, an important restoration species
Published: 2026-09-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Restoration practitioners are considering assisted gene flow to promote persistence of restored vegetation under future climatic conditions. However, for many important restoration species, the extent of climate-associated genomic differentiation remains unclear. Here, we examined climate-associated genomic differentiation in Lemmon’s willow (Salix lemmonii), a key species in Sierra Nevada meadow [...]
Temperature drives transcriptomic shifts in amphibian skin bacterial communities with consequences for fungal pathogen control
Published: 2026-09-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Genomics, Life Sciences
The chytrid fungi Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal) are two of the largest threats to amphibian populations worldwide. While the amphibian skin microbiome can inhibit these fungal pathogens, microbial composition varies substantially across host and environmental contexts. In addition, habitat-wide mitigation methods that capitalize on the thermal [...]
Migration timing depends on balancing the risks of exposure and escape from infection
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
As anthropogenic changes alter animal migration routes, understanding the consequences of these changes is critical for conservation. One consequence of altered migratory routes is exposure to infection by new parasites (i.e., migratory exposure). Theoretical models aiming to understand migration-infection dynamics typically have focused on infection-related benefits (i.e., migratory escape) to [...]
Calibrating exchange-level claims about sperm whale codas against surrogates: overlap, ornamentation and rubato under independent pre-registered control
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Marine Biology
Sharma et al. (Nat. Commun. 15:3617, 2024) report that sperm whale codas carry a combinatorial "phonetic alphabet" built from four dimensions, two of which — rubato (smooth modulation of coda duration across an exchange) and ornamentation (an extra click marking sequence edges) — are properties of coda sequences rather than of codas. Sequence-level claims presuppose a model of the exchange [...]