Preprints
There are 2557 Preprints listed.
Birdwatchers’ attitudes and preferences that influence their decisions to engage in local, national, and international birdwatching trips
Published: 2025-08-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Birdwatching tourism has significant economic potential and is a growing form of ecotourism. Birdwatchers throughout the United States have diverse attitudes and motivations, and here we sought to understand how, and why, birdwatchers select birdwatching destinations at local, in-country, and international scales. A questionnaire survey (n=427 participants) revealed that 98% participate in local [...]
Urbanization Effects on Plant Parasitism: A Multi-Regional Comparison of Endemic Occurrence and Outbreak Intensity
Published: 2025-08-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Parasitology, Plant Pathology, Urban Studies and Planning
Microbial and insect parasitism plays a crucial role in shaping plant communities. The urban stress hypothesis posits that urbanization increases parasitism owing to the physiological environment, whereas the habitat fragmentation hypothesis suggests that habitat fragmentation in urban areas suppresses disease transmission. In the epidemiological triangle (comprising pathogen occurrence, [...]
Northern Riches and Rangifer Risks: A review of the Impacts of Resource Extraction for Caribou and Reindeer
Published: 2025-08-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
As the global demand for energy continues to rise rapidly, northern ecosystems—i.e. Arctic, subarctic, and boreal regions—are especially at risk due to their rich mineral and hydrocarbon potential. The expansion of infrastructure associated with extractive industries often impacts species and may ultimately contribute to population declines, particularly for those less resilient to environmental [...]
Soil drying induces widespread productivity loss but unequal climate vulnerability among ecotypes of a foundational Arctic sedge
Published: 2025-08-06
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Plant Biology
1. As temperatures increase in the Arctic, hydrological change may lead to local soil drying through altered snowpack, evapotranspiration, and drainage due to permafrost thaw. These changes threaten to alter soil moisture regimes that control plant productivity and ecosystem carbon cycling. Eriophorum vaginatum, a foundational sedge that accounts for up to 30% of carbon uptake in moist tundra [...]
Shaping the future of ecological restoration: Integrating predictability and adaptive insights
Published: 2025-08-06
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Forest Management, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Introduction: Ecological restoration must move beyond fixed historical baselines to face the realities of climate change, biodiversity loss, and complex socioecological dynamics. Framework for restoration: We propose the Future-Based Approach (FaBRestor), a novel framework that reframes restoration as a forward-looking, adaptive process. FaBRestor integrates multitemporal lenses—past legacies, [...]
Fostering a natural history community
Published: 2025-08-05
Subjects: Botany, Other Arts and Humanities
Natural history is an individuals-first approach to natural science in which the subject of our study leads us into novel and integrative questions. It is, in Ann Zwinger’s words, a set of practices aimed at “tying together yesterday and tomorrow within the framework of today’s natural world.” Public-school curricula have dropped much of the natural history education that was common through the [...]
A Tubules-First Model for the Origin of Eukaryotic Membrane Traffic
Published: 2025-08-04
Subjects: Cell and Developmental Biology
The discovery of membrane trafficking proteins in Asgard archaea—the closest archaeal relatives of eukaryotes—reveals the deep evolutionary roots of the eukaryotic endomembrane system. This review synthesizes recent genomic, structural, and functional studies in archaea and eukaryotes to explore how these ancient proteins contributed to the emergence of intracellular membranes. While Asgard [...]
Five misunderstandings in animal social network analysis
Published: 2025-08-04
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Animal social network analysis has become central to behavioural ecology, offering powerful tools to explore the links between social behaviour and ecological or evolutionary processes. While rooted in the broader field of social network analysis, the methods used in animal studies have diverged from contemporary practices in the broader field. This divergence has led to conflicting guidance on [...]
Improving the temporal transferability of species distribution models under climate change by incorporating historical species-climate relationship
Published: 2025-08-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how species will respond to climate change is one of the current key challenges in ecology and nature conservation. The tempo-spatial variations of climate makes it more challenging to predict species responses to climate change across their entire ranges. Species distribution models have been widely used for identifying how species distributions respond to climatic drivers. Despite [...]
Trait shifts during range expansions: A meta-analysis
Published: 2025-08-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Populations undergoing range expansions often undergo phenotypic shifts at the leading edge. Understanding how traits change during range expansions could provide insight into predicting invasive species dynamics and responses to climate change. Theory predicts that edge populations should increase in dispersal capability and shift towards reproductive traits that maximize fecundity over [...]
An Evolutionary Hypothesis on the Persistence of Non-Coding DNA in Complex Genomes: The Passive Selfish DNA Model
Published: 2025-08-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Non-coding DNA constitutes the vast majority of eukaryotic genomes, yet its evolutionary role remains largely unresolved. This manuscript proposes a theoretical model in which non-coding DNA persists not due to functional utility, but as "passive selfish DNA"—elements that replicate by coexisting with coding sequences in vital genomes. Drawing analogies with endogenous retroviruses and vertically [...]
TADA! Simple guidelines to improve code sharing
Published: 2025-08-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Code sharing is important for transparency and facilitates computational reproducibility of published research. However, even as the number of journals that encourage or mandate code sharing continues to increase, the prevalence of open code remains low. Furthermore, even when shared, code is often non-functional, which hinders computational reproducibility. One reason for low levels of code [...]
Faecal n-alkanes differ significantly between two lemur species reflecting differences in consumed diet
Published: 2025-08-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
The diet of an animal reflects its species’ ecology and local food availability and is often a key metric for monitoring the health and welfare of endangered species. However, determining diets across individuals and through space and time, is an inherent challenge within ecology, being expensive and time-intensive to accomplish with observations. Faeces offer the opportunity for non-invasive [...]
Tracking the hidden niches: Movement-based insights into northern lapwing intraspecific variation and conservation
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Zoology
Context. Global monitoring data reveal farmland bird population declines, primarily driven by agricultural intensification, chemical inputs, and climate shifts. The northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), a ground-nesting wader adapted to lowland agricultural matrices, exemplifies this decline across Europe. Objectives. This study quantified intraspecific variation in habitat selection to evaluate [...]
Exploring the Integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Artificial Intelligence to Mitigate Human-Wildlife Conflict in Kerala, India
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Increasing human-wildlife conflict (HWC) in forest-fringe landscapes necessitates innovative and culturally acceptable mitigation strategies. This note proposes integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mitigate HWC in Kerala. The proposition aims to translate African rural traditional knowledge of using alarm calls of Guinea fowls (Numida meleagris) [...]