Preprints
There are 2803 Preprints listed.
Multilevel Selection Shaping Adaptive Social Networks
Published: 2025-11-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Human Ecology, Zoology
Understanding how human and non-human animal social networks evolve through emergent properties and feedback mechanisms is essential for explaining their adaptability and persistence. Collective social niche construction refers to the process where individuals, through their interactions, actively shape the social environment, resulting in network structures that influence individual behaviours [...]
Carrion decomposition in a subtropical forest biodiversity experiment
Published: 2025-11-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Tree species richness promotes the diversity of higher trophic levels and ecosystem functioning. Tree species richness may thus also affect communities of insect decomposers, and through this, accelerate the decomposition of animal carrion. However, these effects might be masked by other factors driving decomposition, such as forest structure, topography, and competition between different [...]
Relativity for the Realm of the Living: a geometric framework for eco-evolutionary dynamics
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Abstract: Biological systems are here reinterpreted through a geometric lens that extends the insight of general relativity: organisms and their interactions are modelled as deformations of a multidimensional biological hyperspace. In this view, each entity acts as a source that locally bends a relational field defined by molecular, morphofunctional and ecological axes, thereby altering the [...]
Penguin diet from space: Links between sea ice, Antarctic food webs, and population change
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Rapid environmental change poses a threat to Antarctic ecosystems. However, the spatial scale of Antarctica and its extreme environment have precluded a synoptic understanding of the links between environmental change and ecological responses. Combining tools from imaging spectroscopy, stable isotope analysis, and hierarchical statistical modeling, we developed a novel method to quantify Adélie [...]
An increase in animal diversity was facilitated by ecologically-driven brain complexity throughout the Cambrian
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Developmental Biology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Other Genetics and Genomics, Zoology
The Cambrian Explosion is often seen as a singular event requiring an explanation. In fact, it is better represented as a cascade of linked events, each with numerous causes. The iconic middle Cambrian fauna, represented by sites such as the Burgess Shale, is a culmination of several phases of increases in taxonomic diversity and morphological complexity. I focus on an often-overlooked increase [...]
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: 2025-11-01
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: 2025-11-01
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 [...]