Preprints
There are 3880 Preprints listed.
Fair-weather friends: Group size boosts reproduction in wet, cool years in a cooperative breeder
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is altering global temperature and rainfall patterns, with measurable impacts on reproduction and population persistence. These effects are pronounced in dryland ecosystems that are characterized by high temperatures, and low, but highly variable rainfall. Cooperatively breeding species (where helpers provide parental care to other group members’ offspring) are common in drylands, [...]
The social environment shapes fitness through indirect genetic effects in spotted hyenas
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Additive genetic variance in fitness determines the rate of adaptive evolution. Yet, estimates from wild populations often exceed observed rates of contemporary evolution and realised population growth rates, suggesting that important sources of variation may remain unaccounted for. One important source of variation rarely fully accounted for is the social environment, because social interactions [...]
Latitude and evolutionary history shape the global distribution of migratory butterflies
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Hundreds of butterfly species migrate globally. Seasonal migration allows butterflies track suitable environments across large distances, yet global distribution patterns and the processes that shape them remain poorly understood. Here, using season-specific habitat suitability maps for 426 migratory butterfly species, we assess how morphological traits, environmental conditions and evolutionary [...]
A Wrinkle in Space-Time: Spatial machine learning uncovers stage-specific drivers and hidden hotspots of illegal wildlife trade
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Environmental Studies
The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) persists despite intervention, demanding new approaches to allocate limited prevention and enforcement resources more effectively. Spatial machine learning has been applied to IWT for this purpose, but mainly along one dimension – place. We extend this to simultaneously address place, species, and time, applying machine learning to participatory mapping data [...]
The Doñana Digital Twin: integrating heterogeneous data into iterative, mechanistically grounded forecasts of biodiversity change
Published: 2026-10-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Integrative Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Natural ecosystems are increasingly impacted by multiple global-change drivers, and these impacts propagate non-linearly from individuals to populations and to communities. To anticipate ecological change under such complexities and mitigate negative impacts, we require integrated, mechanistically-grounded approaches to prediction. For mitigation strategies to be adaptive, predictions must also [...]
A common benchmark for Aedes albopictus phenological models reveals surveillance data, not model complexity, as the limiting factor
Published: 2026-10-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Forecasting the seasonal dynamics of Aedes albopictus, a highly invasive arbovirus vector now established across much of Europe, is a growing public health priority. Numerous mechanistic and correlative models have been developed over the last two decades, but largely in isolation, each calibrated and validated against its own data, which has prevented any assessment of where predictive capacity [...]
Linguistic Group Marking as an Emergent Phenomenon
Published: 2026-10-20
Subjects: Demography, Population, and Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This paper examines how linguistic group marking can emerge from the interaction between social ecology, inferential cognition, and cultural transmission. An agent-based model (ABM) simulates interactions within a structured population where agents use domain-general inference and social learning to interpret and adopt linguistic variants. The model implements a mechanism in which uncertainty [...]
Reversing in situ crop genetic diversity loss through incentive-based conservation
Published: 2026-10-16
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Environmental Studies, Food Science, Other Economics
Crop genetic diversity underpins the adaptive capacity of food systems but is declining. Maintaining diversity is challenging because most crop varieties underperform the best-suited ones under current conditions, therefore the private value of currently low-yielding varieties to farmers is limited. However they may carry traits that become critical as conditions change, so their public value as [...]
Ecosystem-based harvest strategies in regional fisheries management
Published: 2026-10-16
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Life Sciences
Fisheries have complex effects on the dynamics and structure of marine ecosystems. Single-stock management in isolation can cause ecosystems to deviate from desired states and fail to achieve both single-stock and ecosystem-wide objectives. This can be addressed through ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM), including ecosystem harvest strategies. We benchmarked the state of development of [...]
Shelterbelts: A Python library for characterising farmland tree groups and their influence on nearby pasture and cropland
Published: 2026-10-16
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Shelterbelts is an open source Python library for mapping and categorising groups of trees in agricultural landscapes, and the corresponding shelter provided to nearby pixels based on the wind direction or density of tree cover. Starting from a binary tree raster, pixels are labelled into ecologically meaningful categories based on their structure and location including: scattered trees, forest [...]
The unequal burden of biodiversity reporting
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Discussions around the first review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework reveal how the pursuit of more comprehensive measurement can obscure a challenge that will define the post-2030 agenda: ensuring that all countries and stakeholders are able to participate in and be represented by the systems used to evaluate global progress.
Stridulation rate as a thermometer in Tettigonia viridissima: a season-long automated record and a test against archive recordings
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
That an insect's song rate follows its temperature has been known since Dolbear proposed reading a cricket as a thermometer in 1897. The relation is not in doubt; its functional form is. Walker (1975a) found stridulation rate approximately linear in ten species of Orchelimum and, reanalysing fifteen published datasets, found linear fits better than exponential in thirteen — but his data were [...]
Elevation gradients shape morphology and acoustic phenotype across isolated songbird populations
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ornithology
Elevational gradients provide natural experiments for examining how environmental variation shapes animal phenotypes. In birds, geographic variation in body size may also influence song frequency because vocal production is constrained by morphology. We tested whether elevation and temperature are associated with coordinated variation in morphology and song frequency in Berthelot’s pipit (Anthus [...]
The acoustic structure and possible mechanical origin of the male Corncrake call
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
The male Corncrake Crex crex produces a distinctive repetitive call whose acoustic structure suggests a mechanically constrained sound-production system rather than a conventional tonal vocalisation. Here I describe observations obtained from approximately 800 field recordings made on Skye between 2020 and 2026 and develop a testable hypothesis for the origin of the long-duration and repetitive [...]
Dietary models of primate brain evolution omit the gut microbiome
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
DeCasien et al. reported that diet, rather than sociality, predicts relative brain size across primates, with frugivores having larger brains than folivores. Their interpretation moves the discussion from sociality towards ecology yet leaves the proposed energetic link biologically unspecified. The matter arising from this dietary framework is gut microbial metabolism, a plausible mechanistic [...]