Preprints
There are 2569 Preprints listed.
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) [...]
Causal models as a scientific framework for next-generation ecosystem and climate-linked stock assessments
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Rapid changes in marine ecosystems highlight the need to account for time-varying productivity in stock assessment models used to support fisheries management. Common approaches incorporate annual variation or regress processes like recruitment, natural mortality, or growth on environmental covariates. While the latter represents a step towards biological realism, it often fails accounting for [...]
From reintroduction to extinction risk: past, present and future of the newly established population of Ospreys in southern Iberia
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biodiversity is declining due to the ongoing environmental global change, and raptors are among the most threatened animal groups. To counteract their decline, birds of prey have frequently been the focus of reintroduction programs worldwide. However, newly established populations must be continuously monitored to assess both short- and long-term success. In this work, we investigate the case of [...]
Abundant empirical evidence of multilevel selection revealed by a bibliometric review
Published: 2025-07-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Natural selection is based on the notion of differential reproduction between entities, often characterized as a struggle between individual organisms. However, natural selection can act at all levels of biological organization, thus being termed ‘multilevel selection’ (MLS). A common misconception is that MLS lacks empirical support. To address this, we conducted a bibliometric review of 2,950 [...]