Preprints
There are 2744 Preprints listed.
Ecosystem dynamics in dune heathlands: spatial and temporal effects of environmental drivers on the vegetation
Published: 2025-11-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Pin-point cover data from 81 Danish dune heathland sites collected over 16 years were analyzed to quantify the effects of key environmental drivers on vegetation dynamics. A spatio-temporal structural equation model within a Bayesian hierarchical framework was used to assess the influence of nitrogen deposition, soil pH, soil C–N ratio, soil type, precipitation, and grazing. The species [...]
Parental care at the molecular level: the metabolic division of labour between parents and offspring
Published: 2025-11-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Parental care during offspring development has traditionally been viewed as a balance between cooperation and conflict. Offspring are imagined to be too helpless to find resources, or build protection, or generate warmth themselves. According to this view, the only work carried out by the offspring is through diverse acts of supplication for these vital resources. These are the traits, therefore, [...]
A theoretical framework for multispecies coexistence in large herbivores based on functional traits and dietary data
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Modern Coexistence Theory (MCT) has long aimed to predict community structure, but empirical support remains scattered across unconnected case-studies from a narrow subset of systems where it is possible to quantify niche and fitness differences (e.g., pairwise interactions between fast-growing plants or protists). We sought a framework to apply MCT to a broader range of ecological scenarios by [...]
European beech reproduction is resilient to drought, including the 2003, 2018, and 2022 extremes
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Climate change is intensifying drought stress in temperate forests, but its effects on tree reproduction, central to forest regeneration and migration capability, remain poorly understood. In mast-seeding species such as European beech (\textit{Fagus sylvatica}), reproduction is regulated by temperature cues rather than current-year resource availability, raising questions about drought [...]
Eye lens isotope tag reveal migration as a driver of Japanese sardine synchrony
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding population fluctuations of broadly distributed marine fishes remains difficult, partly because they often consist of cryptic mixtures of individuals originating from geographically distinct nurseries that experience different environment pressures. However, resolving these spatiotemporally changing mixing processes had been challenging as conventional techniques are highly resource- [...]
Identifying genomic loci under selection in a widespread Bradyrhizobium, across Australian ecosystems using landscape genomics
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is reshaping soil environments, intensifying selective pressures on microbial communities that drive essential ecosystem processes. Understanding how nitrogen-fixing rhizobia adapt to environmental variation is critical for predicting ecosystem responses to global change. Here, we used redundancy analysis (RDA) to identify genomic loci associated with environmental gradients across [...]
The sleeping giant needs coffee: overlooked areas for the integration of plant ecophysiology and evolutionary biology
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Interpretations of evolutionary outcomes are limited without incorporation of physiological ecology; and ecophysiological interpretations would benefit from incorporating evolutionary perspectives. Although there has been a rise of studies in the last 20 years between these fields, evolutionary studies that incorporate plant physiology have largely focused on the same traits (i.e., flowering [...]
Why do birds use green nest material? A systematic review and meta-analysis of experiments
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Many animals construct nests. Nests are often considered extended phenotypes that shape survival and reproduction beyond the builder’s body. Birds are key examples of nest builders, and many add fresh green plant material to their nests. Yet, the adaptive value of this behaviour remains debated. Non-mutually exclusive hypotheses propose roles in courtship signalling, parasite defence, or direct [...]
Understanding individual range use in free-range chickens - a systematic review
Published: 2025-10-30
Subjects: Other Animal Sciences, Veterinary Medicine
Every year, over 50 billion chickens are raised globally for meat and eggs. Increasing consumer demand has driven a shift towards free-range and organic systems. These systems allow chickens outdoor access aimed to improve behavioural diversity, and consequently, welfare. However, studies show that only a portion of a flock use the outdoor range. What causes these individual differences, the [...]
Kinship, Distance, and Reciprocity Underpin Economic Support in the Pantanal Wetland
Published: 2025-10-28
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The behavioural phenomenon of cooperation has been a focus of study in a variety of disciplines. Evolutionary anthropologists often use quantitative methods to test hypotheses on cooperation, grounded in theories such as kinship and reciprocal altruism: people are more likely to help those to whom they are related and who repay the cost of the altruistic act. That said, empirical results are [...]
A coordinated biobank alliance for the zoological and conservation community
Published: 2025-10-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
With dramatic advancements in biological data generation, genetic rescue and reproductive technologies, and inter-institutional coordination of care across entire animal populations, zoos, aquariums, and their collaborators are uniquely positioned to lead population-wide research benefiting animal wellbeing and species survival. However, procedural and inter-institutional barriers make it [...]
Decomposing social interactions: a statistical method for estimating social impact and social responsiveness
Published: 2025-10-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Social interactions mediate the phenotypic expression of fitness-relevant traits. The expression of such labile social traits includes three distinct components: an individual's mean trait value (direct effect), its social responsiveness, and its social impact (indirect effects). Traditional methods, such as variance-partitioning or trait-based models, usually only partition individual variation [...]
Microplastic interference influences Pseudomonas fluorescens in denitrification efficiency of wastewater treatment
Published: 2025-10-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Microbiology, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health
Wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) play an essential role in pathogen and contaminant removal in wastewater. While developed countries treat approximately 70% of industrial wastewater prior to discharge, only about 8% is treated in developing countries. WWTP solutions can reduce the solids load, including microplastics, by up to 98.4%. Still, it is estimated that about 65 million microplastics [...]
Animal dispersal costs are not universal
Published: 2025-10-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Dispersal is a keystone process shaping ecological and evolutionary dynamics, often assumed to be inherently costly. We synthesized 696 effect sizes from 206 studies across 148 animal species, spanning all continents and ecosystems, to test this assumption. Contrary to long-standing dogma, we found no overall effect of dispersal on fitness (mean effect size: -0.03, 95% CIs: -0.09 to 0.03). No [...]
Comparison of simulated and proxy-based climate reconstructions for mid-Holocene Europe reveals high uncertainty
Published: 2025-10-27
Subjects: Climate, Paleobiology
Gridded and time-continuous paleoclimate model outputs are increasingly used to inform high-resolution models in biogeography and other disciplines. However, few studies quantitatively evaluate such outputs for bias, uncertainty, and consistency with other climate reconstructions of similar scale and scope of interest. Here we evaluate downscaled and bias-corrected output from two paleoclimate [...]