A functorial approach to monomorphism categories of species I

We introduce a very general extension of the monomorphism category as studied by Ringel and Schmidmeier which in particular covers generalized species over locally bounded quivers. We prove that analogues of the kernel and cokernel functor send almost split sequences over the path algebra and the preprojective algebra to split or almost split sequences in the monomorphism category. We derive this from a general result on preservation of almost split morphisms under adjoint functors whose counit is a monomorphism. Despite of its generality, our monomorphism categories still allow for explicit computations as in the case of Ringel and Schmidmeier.