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Preprints

There are 2301 Preprints listed.

Ecological harshness mediates reproductive trade-offs in a great tit population

Louis Bliard, Jordan Scott Martin, Dylan Z. Childs, et al.

Published: 2025-04-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Population Biology

Lack’s seminal work on bird clutch sizes has spurred expansive research on reproductive trade-offs, especially focusing on offspring quantity–quality trade-offs and the potential fitness consequences for the parents. The environment is a critical driver of the expression of individual reproductive traits, influencing them through plastic responses. However, the plasticity of reproductive [...]

The effect of group size on ectoparasite load and physiological markers of health in a communally-roosting bird

Kat Bebbington, Kevin D. Matson, Ara Monadjem, et al.

Published: 2025-04-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Group living in animals can provide individuals with many fitness benefits, but also increases their exposure to parasites. However, the relationship between group size and parasite load both across and within species is highly variable, potentially due to selection acting on adaptations to reduce infection risks and costs, as well as species-specific variation in the type and frequency of social [...]

Weaning age and supersuckling in Galápagos Sea Lions (Zalophus wollebaeki): Maternal, offspring and environmental drivers of life-history strategies

Alexandra Childs, Carlina Feldmann, Julia Dyck, et al.

Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Life Sciences

Weaning marks a critical life-history transition in mammals, shaped by maternal investment strategies, offspring condition, and environmental constraints. In Galápagos sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki), weaning age is highly variable, with some individuals continuing to suckle into adulthood (supersucklers). Using 20 years of mark-recapture data from 1890 individuals, we applied multi-state [...]

Diurnal temperature range drives understory plant community composition in micro-climatically complex temperate forests

Adam Lee Mahood, David Barnard, Jacob Macdonald, et al.

Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Diurnal temperature range (DTR) is hypothesized to be a key driver of plant community assembly, because areas with high DTR are exposed to both extreme high and extreme low temperatures on a daily basis. We established networks of temperature and relative humidity sensors along DTR gradients in two montane forest basins, and conducted plant surveys around each sensor (n=46). We examined which [...]

Variability, drivers, and utility of genetic diversity-area relationships in terrestrial vertebrates

Chloé Schmidt, Sean M. Hoban, Deborah M. Leigh, et al.

Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences

Maintaining genetic diversity within and among populations is critical for conservation and a prominent goal of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. However, direct estimates of genetic diversity are unavailable for most species, and time and resources are insufficient to fill these substantial data gaps and meet conservation target timelines. Robust, proxy-based predictions of [...]

A systems perspective: How social-ecological networks can improve our understanding and management of biological invasions

Fiona Sophia Rickowski, Florian Ruland, Örjan Bodin, et al.

Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability

Reversing biodiversity loss and the sustainability crisis requires approaches that explicitly consider human-nature interdependencies. Social-ecological networks (SENs), which incorporate social and ecological actors and entities as well as their interactions, are such an approach. SENs have been applied to a range of complex issues, such as sustainable resource use, management of ecosystem [...]

Long-term fitness effects of the early-life environment in a wild bird population

Yuheng Sun, Terry Burke, Hannah L Dugdale, et al.

Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Life Sciences

Environmental conditions and experiences during development can have long-term fitness consequences, including a reduction of adulthood survival and reproduction. These long-term fitness consequences may play an important role in shaping the evolution of life history. We tested two hypotheses on the long-term fitness effects of the developmental environment – the silver spoon hypothesis and the [...]

Pharmacophagy in Insects: Ecological and Evolutionary Perspectives on the Non-Nutritional Use of Plant Specialized Metabolites

Pragya Singh, Caroline Müller

Published: 2025-04-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences

Herbivorous insects can interact with plants in ways that go beyond nutrition, with plant specialized (secondary) metabolites (PSMs) mediating complex non-nutritional relationships. While PSMs often function as anti-herbivore defenses, many insects have evolved strategies to counteract and even exploit these compounds, using them for purposes such as their own defense against antagonists, [...]

Re-evaluating heterogeneity in evidence synthesis

Alkistis Elliott-Graves

Published: 2025-04-01
Subjects: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Philosophy, Philosophy

Evidence Synthesis, in the form of systematic review and meta-analysis, has seen an enormous increase in recent years, across many different scientific disciplines. However, philosophers have paid comparatively little attention to evidence synthesis, while the majority of analyses are predominantly negative and focus primarily on the use of meta-analysis in medicine. One of the main critiques of [...]

Vibrissae length as a morphological proxy for foraging behaviour in pinnipeds

Svenja Stoehr, Alexandra Childs, Oliver Krüger, et al.

Published: 2025-04-01
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Marine Biology

Foraging behavior is a key driver of ecological and evolutionary processes, with individual specialization shaping how populations respond to environmental change. Polymorphisms in foraging strategies can both enhance and limit behavioral flexibility at the population level, making it crucial to study individual variation. However, studying foraging is notoriously difficult, and while biologging [...]

Cryptic chemoautotrophic and methanotrophic processes complicate the use of carbon stable isotopes in rivers

Amanda Gay DelVecchia

Published: 2025-04-01
Subjects: Life Sciences

The use of carbon stable isotopes has contributed to many important discoveries regarding the base of consumer production in freshwater ecosystems. There is increasing recognition for the prevalence of anoxic conditions and the contributions of methane-derived carbon to freshwater food webs, highlighting the potential for methanotrophy and chemoautotrophy to complicate interpretations of δ13C [...]

Environmental heterogeneity mediates plant diversity and ecosystem stability in mountain ecosystems of the Mediterranean Andes

Laura C. Pérez-Giraldo, Jose M. Cerda-Paredes, Dylan Craven, et al.

Published: 2025-04-01
Subjects: Life Sciences

Globally, mountains are highly diverse ecosystems that serve as natural laboratories for testing fundamental ecological theories, while also providing vital ecosystem services. The biodiversity of these ecosystems is largely attributed to their complex topography, which creates gradients of elevation and environmental heterogeneity. These gradients in turn influence the maintenance of ecosystem [...]

Non-native plant legacies: site-dependent effects on deadwood fungal community species and functions

Baptiste Joseph Wijas, Habacuc Flores-Moreno, Steven D Allison, et al.

Published: 2025-03-29
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences

1) The introduction of non-native species has consequences for ecosystem functions including deadwood decay. Non-native deadwood is a novel substrate for consumers, such as fungi, which drive large portions of carbon cycling, but their response to a novel substrate may depend on their local communities and surrounding environmental conditions. 2) We quantified decomposition rates, chemical [...]

Coarse-scale effects of land cover and fragmentation on Pyrodiversity

Sofia Bajocco, Daniela Guglietta, Jose Maria Costa Saura, et al.

Published: 2025-03-29
Subjects: Life Sciences

Fire plays a crucial role in shaping ecosystem functions at multiple spatial and temporal scales. While traditional studies on fire regimes focus on central tendencies of fire attributes, such as average fire frequency, size, and seasonality, recent research highlights the importance of pyrodiversity as a critical ecological factor. Pyrodiversity reflects the variability in fire attributes across [...]

Beyond sex differences in mean: meta-analysis of differences in skewness, kurtosis, and correlation

Pietro Pollo, Szymon Marian Drobniak, Hamed Haselimashhadi, et al.

Published: 2025-03-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Biological differences between males and females are pervasive. Researchers often focus on sex differences in mean or, occasionally, in variation, albeit other measures can be useful for biomedical and biological research. For instance, differences in skewness (asymmetry of a distribution), kurtosis (heaviness of a distribution’s tails), and correlation (relationship between two variables) might [...]

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