Preprints
There are 2301 Preprints listed.
The Missing Environmental Impacts in Invasive Species Cost Assessments –Insights from an InvaCost-based regional review
Published: 2025-04-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Accounting for the costs incurred due to biological invasions is important for informing invasive species management policies, and understanding and mitigating future losses. InvaCost, a living review and massive database of cost estimates, is a valuable open science resource that can support informed policy and management of invasive species and has since been the basis of many regional and [...]
The molecular evolutionary basis of species formation revisited
Published: 2025-04-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
How do new species arise? This is among the most fundamental questions in evolutionary biology. The first genetic model for how reproductive barriers leads to the origin of new species was proposed nearly 90 years ago. However, empirical evidence for the genetic mechanisms that cause reproductive barriers took many decades to accumulate. In 2010, Presgraves presented a comprehensive review of the [...]
Scaling animal impacts on dispersal and structure through space and time.
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Scaling theory allows us to predict animal impacts on seed distribution, zoogeochemistry, pathogen movement, and vegetation structure over space and time. Here we have both reviewed this literature and suggested future directions to scale such work over space and time and apply it to such disparate fields as ecosystem ecology, paleontology and remote sensing. This chapter is accepted in the [...]
Dynamic pollinator networks maintain pollination efficiency during mast flowering in an insect-pollinated tree
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mast seeding, the synchronous and highly variable reproduction across years, is common among perennial plants, enhancing reproductive success through predator satiation and improved pollination. Animal-pollinated species generally show lower interannual variability in seed production then wind-pollinated plants, often explained by pollinator satiation reducing selection for masting. However, [...]
Modelling approaches for meta-analyses with dependent effect sizes in ecology and evolution: A simulation study
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistical Methodology
1. In ecology and evolution, meta-analysis is an important tool to synthesise findings across separate studies. However, ecological and evolutionary data often exhibit complex dependence structures, such as shared sources of variation within studies, phylogenetic relationships, and hierarchical sampling designs. Recent statistical advancements offer approaches for handling such complexities in [...]
Forest restoration treatments increase native plant diversity but open the door to invasion in the Colorado Front Range
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Forest Biology, Forest Management, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Forest restoration treatments in dry conifer forests of the western United States are often done with objectives to move current forest structure toward historical conditions and, in turn, increase the system’s resilience to future wildfires. But little is known about their effects on understory plant composition, particularly over the long-term. This is especially true in the Colorado Front [...]
Drought-induced tree mortality affects the space-use and individual plasticity of an endangered forest carnivore
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Rapid changes in landscape structure can disrupt the ecology and life history of species of conservation concern. Shifting climate, land-use, and disturbance regimes are generating novel landscape patterns, and it is unclear how these novel conditions may affect imperiled species. In the Sierra Nevada of California, USA, extensive drought-induced tree mortality has rapidly altered forest [...]
Functional traits drive the competitive assembly of ant communities and impact colony performance in competition mesocosms
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Studies along broad spatial and habitat gradients evidence that organisms’ traits can influence community assembly through their impact on dispersal and environmental filtering. However, the role of traits in structuring local faunal communities within habitats remains poorly understood. In particular, the often-assumed role of traits in affecting the outcome of competition among animal species [...]
Shifts in phenology and species ranges restructure the flowering season across North America
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Global change is altering the phenology and geographic ranges of flowering species, with potentially profound consequences for the timing and composition of floral resources and the seasonal structure of ecological communities. However, shifts in flowering phenology and species distributions have historically been studied in isolation due to disciplinary silos and limited data, leaving critical [...]
De Novo Gene Emergence: Summary, Classification, and Challenges of Current Methods
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Genomics
A novel mechanism of de novo gene origination from non-genic sequences was first proposed in the early 2000s. Subsequent studies have since provided evidence of de novo gene emergence across all domains of life, revealing its occurrence to be more frequent than initially anticipated. While studies mainly agree on the general concept of de novo emergence from non-genic DNA, the exact methods and [...]
AedesTraits: A global database of temperature–dependent trait responses in Aedes mosquitoes
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Invasive Aedes mosquitoes are major vectors of arboviral diseases such as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, posing an increasing threat to global public health. Their recent geographic expansion calls for predictive models to simulate population dynamics and transmission risk. Temperature is a key driver in these models, influencing traits that affect vector competence. While data on [...]
IQ-TREE 3: Phylogenomic Inference Software using Complex Evolutionary Models
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
IQ-TREE (http://www.iqtree.org) is a widely used open-source software tool for efficiently inferring phylogenetic trees under maximum likelihood. Here, we present IQ-TREE version 3, the third major release of the software. IQ-TREE 3 significantly extends version 2 with new features, including mixture models as an alternative to partitioned models, gene and site concordance factors to quantify [...]
Characterising local climates and biologically-relevant climate changes on the Southern Ocean Islands
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The Southern Ocean climate has undergone significant changes over the last several decades, which has had consequences for conditions on the few small islands scattered across the region. Previous investigations of climate changes on the Southern Ocean Islands (SOIs) have examined single climate variables, such as temperature, and single islands or island groups. Furthermore, these studies have [...]
Reflections from the 2025 EcoHack: AI & LLM Hackathon for Applications in Evidence-based Ecological Research & Practice
Published: 2025-04-05
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences
This paper presents outcomes from the inaugural "EcoHack: AI & LLM Hackathon for Applications in Evidence-based Ecological Research & Practice," which convened participants from across Europe and beyond, culminating in 11 team submissions. These submissions highlighted six broad application areas of AI for ecology: (1) AI-enhanced decision support and automation, (2) scientific search and [...]
Understanding different types of repeatability and intra-class correlation for an analysis of biological variation
Published: 2025-04-05
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Repeatability (more generally known as intraclass correlation) represents an important quantity of interest in many scientific fields. It represents a metric for summarizing variance decomposition to identify sources of variation in an outcome of interest (e.g. organismal traits). The estimation of variance components is often achieved through linear mixed-effect models or their extension, [...]