Preprints
There are 2768 Preprints listed.
RevSyntax enables an efficient workflow for RevBayes analysis in VS Code
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
RevBayes—a phylogenetic probabilistic graphical modeling software—presents prospective users with a steep learning curve. RevBayes lacks a custom integrated development environment (IDE) to facilitate writing and executing code, and as a result many users end up copying and pasting individual lines of code from a text editor into a terminal window. This inefficient and error-prone process limits [...]
Natural Heritage: A Teaching Game For Biodiversity Conservation
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Higher Education
The potential for computer games to serve as effective learning and teaching tools is now widely acknowledged. Here, we present ‘Natural Heritage’, an educational turn-based strategy game about biodiversity conservation. In it, the player takes on the role of an elected policy maker who has to balance ecological and economic targets while managing regional land use. The game aims to teach key [...]
The Thermodynamic Imperative: Evolution as Entropic Resistance through Mergers and Persistence
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
This paper presents a unified theory of persistence, presenting the argument that evolution should be reframed as an explanation of entropic resistance rather than reproductive fitness. Through theoretical exposition and case studies across the biological spectrum, I demonstrate that persistence emerges from the capacity to merge through complementarity, integrate functionally, and form [...]
Asynchrony of ageing among traits in a wild bird population
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ageing i.e. age-related changes in a trait, is a highly variable process. Studies have investigated variation in ageing among species and individuals, but little is yet understood about variation between traits. Evolutionary hypotheses argued that traits should age synchronously as selection should improve the trait that first senesces, therefore leading to trait synchrony. However, some past [...]
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: 2025-11-02
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 [...]