Discover, rate, and verify biology preprints.

Ecological networks balance connectivity with flexibility to perturbations

Across 1,569 food-web, mutualistic and host–parasite networks, connectance falls as S^−0.65 while links per species rise; a diffusion-efficiency metric places networks near a local optimum.

Mixtures of stably coexisting species overyield

In generalized Lotka–Volterra communities, stable coexistence almost always requires overyielding; in four long-term biodiversity experiments, underyielding raised species-loss odds within two observations (pooled odds ratio 2.61).

Fast pace of life is associated with host status in small mammals, despite pervasive surveillance bias

Arenavirus and hantavirus surveillance in small mammals tracks night-lights and accessibility; after adjusting for effort, fast-lived and synanthropic species are somewhat more often detected as hosts.

Scrub Data: A Framework for Reproducible Data Curation with AI Coding Agents

Scrub Data routes AI-agent data edits through an API-enforced provenance graph of executable Python steps; it curated 89M wildlife GPS points into the 2.6M-point MoveBench benchmark.

Metagenomic analysis of the effects of European bison Bison bonasus (Linnaeus, 1758) presence on soil community structure and function in West Blean and Thornden Woods, Kent

Nanopore shotgun metagenomics of 56 Kent woodland soils finds stable alpha diversity but significantly shifted KEGG functional composition two years after European bison release.

Reflectance spectra capture temporal variation in functional traits and their integration across leaf phenology

Weekly leaf spectra and traits in seven temperate species reveal phenophase-dependent trait correlations; peak-season PLSR models fail at senescence while full-season models track trait dynamics.

One-Class Bioacoustic Detector for Monitoring the Critically Endangered Pied Tamarin (Saguinus bicolor)

Band-pass-filtered Perch embeddings scored by a One-Class SVM trained on 82 pied tamarin calls detect the species cross-site with precision 0.86 but limited sensitivity.

Genetic canalization of nutrient resorption: evidence from a widespread grass under effective salt stress

In 110 common-garden Phragmites australis genotypes, effective salt stress left N, P and K resorption efficiency largely unchanged; efficiency instead tracked phylogeographic lineage, ecotype and latitude.

Behavioral metabolic suppression confounds thermal performance estimates and climate vulnerability assessments in a marine ectotherm

In an undescribed intertidal Urticina anemone, heat-induced closure suppresses measured respiration, and fitted thermal performance curves place the critical thermal maximum far above the 25-30°C lethal range.

Nutrient environments shape amino acid auxotrophy and cross-feeding

Across 40 carbon-nitrogen environments, six matched E. coli and B. subtilis amino acid auxotrophs show context-dependent auxotrophy, while auxotroph type predicts cross-feeding yield better than environment.

The morphotype approach to classification of aerial animals in radar data

Splitting BirdScan MR1 radar bird classes by wingbeat frequency and radar cross section turns 4 classes into 31 morphotypes, most matching under 10 Israeli species.

Spatially explicit capture-recapture models for relative density

Maximizing the conditional likelihood in spatially explicit capture-recapture models estimates spatial relative density and population growth rates rapidly while remaining robust to unmodeled individual detection heterogeneity.

The Portal Project: a long-term study of a Chihuahuan desert ecosystem

The Portal Project archives over 40 years of continuous monthly rodent, biannual plant, multi-decade ant, and automated weather data from 24 experimentally manipulated Chihuahuan Desert plots with automated quality control.

Wildlife trade drives animal-to-human pathogen transmission over 40 years

Legally traded wild mammals have higher odds (OR 2.72) of sharing pathogens with humans, and each 9 years in global trade adds roughly one human-shared pathogen.

A breath of fresh air: comparative evaluation of passive versus active airborne eDNA sampling strategies

Passive 3D-printed Nutshell air eDNA samplers hung up to 96 hours at Rotterdam Zoo detected 76 vertebrate species, versus 50 and 25 for two active samplers.

Large language models possess some ecologicalknowledge, but how much?

Benchmarking GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro across five closed-book ecological tasks shows solid coarse species presence and trait recall but poor fine-scale range mapping and threat classification.

Viruses and vectors tied to honey bee colony losses

During early-2025 US honey bee collapses (>60% losses), dying bees carried high loads of infectious DWV-A, DWV-B, and ABPV, and 100% of screened Varroa mites carried the amitraz-resistance allele.

Functional response predicts invasiveness but not trophic impact

Across 269 functional responses from 45 freshwater fish species, invasive species exceed non-invasive species only when sampled in their native range; introduced populations match non-invasive species.

A General Method for Detection and Segmentation of Terrestrial Arthropods in Images

flatbug, a YOLOv8 instance-segmentation model with multi-scale tile-pyramid inference and polygon-based deduplication, segments terrestrial arthropods across 23 image subdatasets and transfers to held-out subdatasets with a modest F1 penalty.

Flexible Methods for Species Distribution Modeling with Small Samples

For species with 20 or fewer occurrence records, 24 of 31 species distribution models had AUC distributions not significantly different from Maxnet's; vote-counting ensembles give upper and lower range bounds.