Preprints
There are 2629 Preprints listed.
A new participatory conservation framework built on the rise of native plant gardening
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Global biodiversity strategies are ambitious on paper but fall short in practice. It is not strategy we lack, but the capacity to translate these plans into action on the ground. Akin to the community scientists that revolutionised biodiversity monitoring, we posit that community stewards, emerging from the rapidly growing native plant gardening movement, could scale up science-informed plant [...]
A concept using α-niche evolution within bacterial communities to direct β-niche evolution of focal species
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
The process of bacterial adaptation has a profound impact on human wellbeing and health, but our toolkit to modify evolution is limited. Here, we present a concept of how steering evolution can be achieved by integration of ecological and evolutionary approaches. The fundamental issue is how specific species bloom after community perturbance and subsequently evolve. We consider two kinds of [...]
"Homo informatio"
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Did very “small-world” networks enhance the Darwinian fitness of primaeval Homo through exchanges of information that enabled exploration of resources beyond those exploitable at hand? An active inference suggestion is offered about the early evolution of human social behaviour. A phylogenetic split ~7.5 Ma (million years ago) separated paninan ancestors that were unlike today's chimpanzees, and [...]
Social uncertainty influences the optimal balance of quantity and quality of cooperative relationships
Published: 2025-09-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Many group-living animals develop and maintain stable affiliative social relationships. These ‘social bonds’ can benefit survival and reproduction, but they require significant investments of time and energy. How should individuals allocate those investments towards building new relationships (“diversifying”) versus maintaining existing ones (“focusing”)? The ‘social bet-hedging’ hypothesis [...]
Closing the Coral Life Cycle: A service blueprint to overcome the coral recruitment crisis through research, restoration, and innovation
Published: 2025-09-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Coral reefs underpin marine biodiversity and the functioning of oceanic ecosystems, yet since the 1970s they have experienced unprecedented degradation, with the Caribbean region exhibiting some of the most acute declines. Global climate change—through warming, acidification, and intensified storm activity—combined with local stressors such as sedimentation, eutrophication, and over‑exploitation, [...]
No effect of ocean acidification on individual-level variation in behaviour and susceptibility to predation in a Great Barrier Reef damselfish
Published: 2025-09-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biology, Integrative Biology, Marine Biology, Physiology, Zoology
1) Ocean acidification, caused by rising carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, has been reported to negatively impact a wide variety of behaviours in fishes, including activity, exploration, and predator avoidance. 2) These effects have been documented at the population level, but many animal species naturally show large and repeatable individual-level differences in behaviour. How [...]
Distribution et noyaux périphériques de la Pie-grièche méridionale Lanius meridionalis en France : apport d’un modèle de distribution d’espèces
Published: 2025-09-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Cette étude analyse les facteurs environnementaux influençant la distribution de la Pie-grièche méridionale Lanius meridionalis en France à partir d’observations 2020–2023 collectées en période de reproduction. La probabilité de présence est principalement expliquée par des variables climatiques, topographiques et d’occupation du sol. Elle augmente avec la température moyenne du trimestre le plus [...]
Systematic review of heatwave experiments on plant health and survival
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Background: Heatwaves, which are becoming more intense and more frequent due to global warming, are a major threat to the stability of plant populations and ecosystems. Safeguarding ecosystem function requires a clear understanding of vulnerability to these extreme events. Yet vulnerability cannot be reliably inferred from experiments that manipulate only mean temperatures or from standard [...]
Interaction Matrices as Unifying Tools for Navigating Ecological Complexity
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Interaction matrices summarise pairwise species impacts within ecological communities into an analytically tractable format and have been central to advancing our understanding of ecosystem dynamics. However, despite their ubiquity, they have faced constant, recurring, criticism for oversimplifying ecological complexity. While suggested extensions address specific shortcomings, they often come [...]
Contribution to the knowledge of the distribution of bats (Chiroptera) in Algeria
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Algeria is the largest country in Africa and for the most part has not yet been surveyed for bat species. To contribute to the knowledge of the distribution of Algerian bat fauna, between 2010 and 2025 we surveyed 69 sites from across the country, mostly roost sites but also using mist nets. We found 19 species from six families, out of a total of 27 species from seven families currently [...]
Potential for academic institutions to support international biodiversity commitments
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Environmental Policy, Environmental Studies
The implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) emphasises a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society” approach to achieving ambitious biodiversity conservation Goals and Targets. The Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD invites academic and research institutions to support the implementation of the KMGBF and [...]
Advancing single species abundance models by leveraging multi-species data to reveal lake-specific patterns for fisheries predictions
Published: 2025-09-03
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Predicting species abundance is critical for understanding ecological dynamics and guiding conservation and management strategies. Traditional species abundance models (SAMs) rely on environmental variables and the presence or absence of key species, but often overlook community context and unmeasured environmental variation. Community composition can serve as a proxy for both unobserved [...]
Genetic Structure and Population Differentiation of Chrysanthemum zawadzkii in Its Isolated European Range
Published: 2025-09-03
Subjects: Population Biology
This study investigated the genetic structure and diversity of Zawadzki's chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum zawadzkii), a relict and endemic species with an isolated population in the Pieniny Mountains, Central Europe. The primary objective was to determine whether this population is genetically homogenous or consists of distinct subpopulations. To achieve this, plant material was collected from 13 [...]
Relational Thinking for Landscape Management and Conservation: can we really embrace a human/nature continuity?
Published: 2025-09-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies
It is increasingly recognized that the conservation of natural and degraded landscapes requires rethinking our relationships with nature by considering social-ecological complexity. Currently, managers are faced with a wealth of knowledge in landscape ecology, restoration ecology and related fields, that are all mobilized to solve management problems. However, many conceptual propositions fall [...]
What time is it? Interactions between trees and fossils
Published: 2025-09-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Molecular sequence data is not in itself informative about absolute evolutionary timescales. Fossils are therefore often analysed alongside molecular data in order to generate time-scaled reconstructions of the tree-of-life. Here, I analyse interactions between fossils and molecular based reconstructions of the tree-of-life, and explore the implications of these interactions for time-scaling the [...]