Preprints
There are 2524 Preprints listed.
The hidden dimensions of biodiversity
Published: 2025-07-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Uncovering and describing biodiversity is fundamental to advancing both scientific understanding and public awareness of nature. While many biodiversity facets are visible and even in the spotlight, including those biodiversity features we encounter on a daily basis, much of the world’s biodiversity remains hidden. This review addresses the critical questions: What dimensions constitute hidden [...]
Reevaluating Global Whale Strandings: A Review of Trypanosomiasis as a Potential Cause
Published: 2025-07-18
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
Whale mass strandings are enigmatic events with multifactorial causes. Conventional hypotheses include anthropogenic sonar exposure, navigational errors, and infectious diseases, yet many stranding events remain unexplained¹. Here we propose African trypanosomiasis (“sleeping sickness”) as an overlooked contributing factor. This perspective synthesizes evidence that Trypanosoma parasites, [...]
Substitution Models in Phylogenetic Reconstruction from Molecular Data: Theoretical Principles, Implementation and Selection Methodologies, Limits of Results Interpretation, and Recent Advances
Published: 2025-07-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Substitution models constitute the mathematical foundation of modern phylogenetic inference, providing the probabilistic framework necessary for reconstructing evolutionary relationships from molecular sequence data. These models describe the stochastic processes governing nucleotide or amino acid changes over evolutionary time through continuous-time Markov chains, enabling maximum likelihood [...]
Habitat availability, Jurassic and Cretaceous origins of the deep-bodied shark morphotype, and the rise of pelagic sharks
Published: 2025-07-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Macroevolutionary trends in morphology fundamentally shape our understanding of marine ecosystems through deep time. Sharks (Elasmobranchii: Selachii) have been suggested to broadly exhibit two discrete body forms: one ‘shallow-bodied’ form associated with slow-moving benthic species, and a ‘deep-bodied’ form typified by highly active pelagic taxa. Until now, the validity or evolution of these [...]
Geography of masting synchrony creates more famines than feasts
Published: 2025-07-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Interannually highly variable and synchronized production of large seed crops by perennial plants, called masting, drives resource pulses and famines with cascading effects on food webs. While the spatial scale of masting synchrony is well documented, it remains unclear how synchrony differs between years of seed abundance and failure, and how such dynamics extend across species and space. These [...]
The influence of the incubation environment and parental care on Tokay gecko (Gekko gecko, Gekkonidae) development in captivity
Published: 2025-07-17
Subjects: Other Animal Sciences, Zoology
Parental effects, non-genetic effects that parents exert on their offspring, can result in adaptive phenotypes that ensure offspring survival. In captivity, reptiles often experience unnatural incubation and rearing conditions due to limited nest site choices, which can negatively impact individual development and welfare. Incubation temperature and humidity are especially critical for reptile [...]
Strategic conservation of tropical insects
Published: 2025-07-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Insect species are declining globally, yet they are often overlooked in biodiversity conservation measures. The tropics harbour > 80% of all insect species; however, information on their ecology and conservation status is largely lacking. It is imperative to identify solutions to the issues of data availability and integration of scientific findings with conservation policy for tropical [...]
Behavioural tactics across thermal gradients align with partial morphological divergence in brook charr
Published: 2025-07-16
Subjects: Animal Studies, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences
Understanding how animals balance environmental constraints is essential for predicting species persistence under climate change. In thermally stratified lakes, cold-water fishes such as brook charr (Salvelinus fontinalis) must navigate vertical gradients in temperature and oxygen to optimize foraging while avoiding physiological stress. We hypothesized that individuals would exhibit behavioral [...]
An overview of open science in eco-evo research and the publisher effect.
Published: 2025-07-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Sharing data and code is increasingly recognized as essential for transparency and reproducibility in scientific research. This is especially critical in ecology and evolutionary biology (eco-evo), where sampling and experiments often occur in the field and can hardly be reproduced. To monitor the adoption of open science practices in eco-evo and identify key influencing factors, we analyzed [...]
A systems-modelling approach to predict biological responses to extreme heat
Published: 2025-07-16
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Systems Biology
Anthropogenic climate change is leading to more frequent and extreme heat waves. These short-term but large-scale events are radically re-shaping interactions among organisms – impacting biodiversity, community composition and ecosystem services crucial to natural systems and food security. Predicting heat wave impacts on interacting species requires an understanding of the processes driving [...]
Implementation of Advances in Information Technology in the Treatment of Phylogenetic Problems: Historical Considerations, Central Debates, and Obstacles Still Unresolved
Published: 2025-07-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
The field of phylogenetic inference has undergone a profound transformation through the integration of advanced information technology, evolving from traditional morphological classification systems to sophisticated computational frameworks capable of processing genomic-scale datasets. This comprehensive review examines the historical trajectory of computational phylogenetics, tracing its [...]
Ontogenetic Carnivory Drives Secondary Production Across a Productivity Gradient
Published: 2025-07-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Ontogenetic size shifts and omnivory are central to understanding consumer-resource interactions and energy flow in aquatic ecosystems. However, how these shifts and feeding behavior influence secondary production and organic matter flow remains poorly understood. 2. Here, we quantified the relationship between body size, carnivory (i.e., animal tissue consumption), secondary production, and [...]
DrawerDissect: Whole-drawer insect imaging, segmentation, and transcription using AI
Published: 2025-07-15
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
1. Many museums curate vast collections of insect specimens. These collections represent invaluable records of biodiversity information, ecological patterns and phenotypic variation. However, traditional methods of imaging specimens and digitizing their metadata are labor-intensive and risk damaging delicate specimens. High-throughput imaging of entire specimen drawers integrated with computer [...]
Multidimensional microclimate velocities alter the picture of shifting climates in tropical forests
Published: 2025-07-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Climate velocity—the speed and direction species must move to track climate change—is often estimated without accounting for vegetation-driven microclimatic variation. Using airborne lidar data from a tropical montane rainforest, we generated high-resolution 3D maps of topography and canopy structure to mechanistically model near-ground and within-canopy microclimates. Microclimate-derived [...]
Catalysing community-led local nature recovery with opportunity mapping: lessons from the Oxfordshire Treescape Project
Published: 2025-07-11
Subjects: Nature and Society Relations, Spatial Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Background. The UK has ambitious nature recovery targets. Local communities and land managers have knowledge, expertise, and capacity to support place-based nature recovery, making them well-placed to help deliver these goals. We explore how these groups can be supported in nature recovery plans that combine their local knowledge with complex ecological data, using Oxfordshire Treescape [...]