Preprints
There are 2749 Preprints listed.
Going with, or going to the dogs: City Serenade of Multispecies Survival
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Human Ecology, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Population Biology, Urban Studies and Planning, Zoology
1. As tropical cities rapidly urbanise, multispecies coexistence faces unprecedented challenges. Ground-dwelling (dogs), arboreal (macaques), and aerial (black kites) urban commensals navigate complex social-ecological systems shaped by anthropogenic resource provisioning, cultural practices, and architectural constraints. Despite escalating human-animal conflicts—20 million annual dog bites in [...]
Beneath the Pavement: Understanding mycorrhizal fungi in urban ecosystems and the path forward
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Studies, Human Ecology, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Urban expansion is reshaping ecosystems worldwide, yet the responses of mycorrhizal fungi—key mediators of plant–soil interactions—remain poorly understood. In this review, we synthesize current knowledge on the environmental and ecological factors shaping mycorrhizal fungal diversity, distribution, and function in cities. We highlight how greenspace and landscape features—including plant [...]
Environmental drivers of structural colour in bees (Hymenoptera: Anthophila)
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim: Environmental drivers frequently predict global patterns of colour diversity, but whether such patterns depend on the underlying colour mechanisms – pigments or microscopic structures – has scarcely been considered. Structural colour may have different functional properties that result in different associations with environmental variables. Here we test whether the presence of structural [...]
Stranding-Based Demographic Inference in Marine Mammals: Best Practices for Extracting Vital Rates Despite Compound Sampling Bias
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Strandings records provide the only demographic data source for many marine mammal species. Yet they may be heavily biased. Every carcass passes through sequential filtering: mortality cause, oceanographic drift, decomposition, detection, and sampling. Each stage distorts age-specific signals. This creates a fundamental paradox: strandings are essential yet appear unreliable for demographic [...]
Overstating trophic cascade strength following large carnivore restoration in Yellowstone: A comment on Painter et al. (2025)
Published: 2025-11-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Painter et al. (2025) claim that large-carnivore recovery in Yellowstone National Park has produced a strong trophic cascade compared to other systems, citing a 152 fold increase in aspen sapling density and widespread recruitment of new trees. We show that these conclusions substantially overstate the cascade’s strength because of key methodological and interpretive flaws. First, Painter et al. [...]
Ecosystem dynamics in dune heathlands: spatial and temporal effects of environmental drivers on the vegetation
Published: 2025-11-02
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 [...]