Preprints
There are 3140 Preprints listed.
Habitat amount control is necessary but not sufficient to resolve the fragmentation debate
Published: 2026-03-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Opposing conclusions from the same global multi-taxa dataset have intensified debate over whether fragmentation effects can be inferred independently of habitat amount in observational landscape studies. Gonçalves-Souza et al. (2025) reported lower local- and landscape-scale diversity in fragmented landscapes, whereas Fahrig et al. (2026) reanalysed the same dataset with continuous, scale-matched [...]
Microbial Inoculants for Soil Restoration: A Practical Framework for Risk-Governed Stewardship
Published: 2026-03-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Global soil degradation and increasing reliance on chemical inputs threaten agricultural sustainability, driving interest in microbial inoculants as tools for soil restoration. These biological products have the potential to enhance nutrient cycling, improve soil structure, and support plant resilience, but their environmental release raises important safety and stewardship considerations. Here, [...]
Coexistence of phenotypic plasticity and habitat use in natural populations
Published: 2026-03-24
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
When studying how individuals adapt to environmental changes, the environment is traditionally viewed as a passive backdrop, with individuals modifying their phenotype in response to environmental conditions (i.e., phenotypic plasticity). However, this perspective overlooks the active role of habitat choice in mediating individual responses to environmental changes. In this paper, we argue for [...]
Genetic variance and phenotypic selection on pathogen-linked oviposition choice in Drosophila
Published: 2026-03-24
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Behavior and Ethology, Entomology, Evolution, Genetics, Integrative Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology
Pathogen-avoidance behaviour is assumed to be adaptive, yet its phenotypic variability and genetic heritability are rarely quantified. In species lacking post-oviposition care, avoiding potentially infectious egg-laying substrates would improve offspring survival and should therefore be under strong selection. We used two-choice oviposition assays to quantify the phenotypic and genetic variance [...]
Direct and biodiversity-mediated effects of climate on grassland productivity across the Alps
Published: 2026-03-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how climate shapes ecosystem productivity through both energetic constraints and biodiversity‑mediated pathways remains a major challenge in global change ecology, particularly in mountain grasslands where rapid warming and strong environmental gradients interact. Here, we disentangle and map direct climatic controls on productivity from indirect effects mediated by canopy [...]
Heritabilities and genetic correlations of Drosophila melanogaster locomotory behaviour traits: a high-throughput phenotyping approach
Published: 2026-03-24
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Evolution
Genetic variance forms the basis for evolutionary inferences as it describes the evolutionary potential of traits. The major limitation of quantitative genetic studies is achieving sufficient power and sample sizes to estimate heritabilities with sufficient precision. This issue is especially important in the case of traits that are inherently susceptible to stochastic, nonbiological variation. [...]
High Data Quality Enhances Microplastic Toxicity Prediction
Published: 2026-03-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Unlike chemicals, microplastics (MPs) lack standardized identifiers, limiting the applicability of traditional predictive ecotoxicology methods such as quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models. This study aimed to predict MP toxicity using MP properties, MP concentration, organismal traits, endpoints, and experimental design, and to evaluate how data pre-processing, dataset [...]
Synergies and trade-offs between tree cover expansion efforts within and outside forests to achieve climate, biodiversity and human well-being outcomes
Published: 2026-03-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Increasing tree cover is hailed as a leading climate mitigation strategy, yet there is increasing evidence that there may be trade-offs between trees in different parts of the landscape. Existing science, policy, and practice on natural climate solutions (NCS) assumes that trees outside of forests, for example on farms, homesteads, or in urban areas, are synergistic with forest conservation: if [...]
A robust method for quantifying the contribution of transient dynamics to variation in population growth rate
Published: 2026-03-21
Subjects: Population Biology
Understanding why population growth rates vary through time is central to ecology, evolution, and conservation. In structured populations, such variation arises from both environmentally-driven fluctuations in vital rates and intrinsic transient dynamics generated by changes in population structure. Despite long-standing recognition of these processes, existing approaches do not provide an exact [...]
Missing the mammals for the trees: comparative biogeography of southern Appalachian sky island biodiversity
Published: 2026-03-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Sky islands are patches of relic ecosystems on mountaintops, often forest types, that were previously connected in the geological past and are now patchily distributed. Whether a particular sky island forest serves as an umbrella for conserving sky island fauna with a similar patchy distribution is an open question. To address this, we systematically delineate sky islands and identify [...]
Insect oviposition as a simple system to investigate the ecology and evolution of pathogen avoidance behaviour
Published: 2026-03-21
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Integrative Biology, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology
Behavioural avoidance of pathogens and parasites is a ubiquitous first line of defence, yet we lack tractable systems that connect cue detection to fitness consequences, population transmission, and coevolution. We propose insect oviposition as a model that yields general principles for avoidance across taxa. Oviposition decisions fix offspring exposure, they are governed by well‑mapped sensory [...]
Towards a better understanding of adaptation: Problem description, partial solutions, and recommendations
Published: 2026-03-20
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Developmental Biology, Evolution, Human Ecology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Genetics and Genomics, Other Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Population Biology, Science and Technology Studies
This paper is the product of an international workshop aiming to make progress in our general understanding of adaptation. We met from 5-7 February 2025 in Hannover (Germany), funded by the foundation “Volkswagen Stiftung”. For our group of theoretical and empirical biologists, social scientists, and philosophers of science we set up a program to facilitate communication and collaboration between [...]
(R)evolution Stings Back: Rethinking Strategies for Conserving Local Biodiversity of the Western Honey Bee (Apis mellifera)
Published: 2026-03-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
The western honey bee (Apis mellifera) occupies an unusual position between domesticated livestock and wild organisms, creating persistent ambiguity in conservation policy. Most current conservation programmes prioritise controlled breeding, phenotypic stability, and lineage integrity, implicitly treating honey bees as populations dependent on continuous human management. While effective at [...]
iDeer: A decision-support tool for managing deer alongside woodland creation
Published: 2026-03-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Management, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Increasing deer (Cervidae) densities driven by land-use change and climate warming represent a growing challenge to the establishment and management of woodlands across temperate biomes. Targeting deer management is challenging without spatially explicit information on potential impact risks under alternative management scenarios. Here we present the iDeer Tool [...]
Permissible Spite: Kin Selection, Demography, and the Inverse Hamiltonian Equation
Published: 2026-03-20
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Systems Biology
This article revisits Hamilton’s rule by proposing an inverted formulation to evaluate the evolutionary permissibility of spiteful behavior within kin-based populations. We formalize a reverse Hamiltonian equation and apply replicator dynamics to investigate the demographic and genetic conditions under which within group aggression may become evolutionarily stable. The model shows that in [...]