Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Early environmental conditions do not impact behavioural flexibility in an invasive and non-invasive lizard species
Published: 2024-12-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Behavioural flexibility, the ability to adjust behaviour adaptively in response to internal or external changes, is expected to be crucial for animals adapting to environmental fluctuations. However, the conditions experienced during early development can profoundly impact behavioural flexibility making it unclear how populations will respond to novel circumstances. Stressful situations faced by [...]
The impacts of pesticide exposure on fish conspecific interactions: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
The production of chemical pesticides poses a critical threat to aquatic ecosystems worldwide, with adverse effects evident even at sublethal concentrations. Historically, ecotoxicologists have ignored an organism’s social context when investigating the effects of pesticide exposure and, instead, have tended to focus on individual-level impacts. Recently, however, there has been a growing [...]
Reduced levels of relatedness indicate that great-tailed grackles disperse further at the edge of their range
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
It is generally thought that behavioral flexibility, the ability to change behavior when circumstances change, plays an important role in the ability of a species to rapidly expand their geographic range. However, it is an alternative non-exclusive possibility that an increase in the amount of available habitat can also facilitate a range expansion. Great-tailed grackles (*Quiscalus mexicanus*) [...]
Forecasting patterns of shifting biodiversity refuges in an increasingly flammable world
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
In a warming and rapidly changing world, biodiversity is increasingly threatened by more frequent, severe, and larger fires. Variation in the life history attributes and habitat preferences of species mean that they may be affected differently by fire, and hence, decision makers must account for this. Understanding how fire affects the distribution of important areas of habitat and refuges for [...]
A phylogenetic sectional taxonomy of Leucheria Lag. (Asteraceae; Nassauvieae)
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Multiple molecular phylogenetic analyses have demonstrated that the genus Polyachyrus Lag. (8 spp.) is phylogenetically nested among four well-supported but unnamed monophyletic lineages of the genus Leucheria Lag. (28-46 spp.; Asteraceae; Nassauvieae). In order to facilitate reference to these lineages per current phylogenetic taxonomic and botanical nomenclatural conventions, a phylogenetic [...]
Cognitive processes are robust to early environmental conditions in two lizard species
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Animals must acquire new information through learning to adjust their behavior adaptively. However, learning ability can be constrained by conditions experienced during early development, when the brain is especially susceptible to environmental conditions. For example, temperature can result in phenotypically plastic adjustments to growth, metabolism, and learning in ectotherms. In vertebrates, [...]
A dataset for benchmarking molecular identification tools based on genome skimming
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Genome skimming is an emerging tool allowing for scalable DNA barcoding efforts for numerous biodiversity science applications. Despite its growing importance, there are few standardized datasets for benchmarking genome skimming tools, making it challenging to evaluate new methods (e.g., using machine learning), and comparing to existing ones (e.g., conventional barcoding loci derived from [...]
Parasite traits shape the association between forest loss and infection: A global meta-analysis
Published: 2024-12-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Forest loss can affect host–parasite dynamics, posing risks to wildlife and human health. Most work has investigated how host traits moderate associations between forest loss and prevalence, but the role that parasite traits play is less understood. We synthesized parasite prevalence and parasite trait data from publicly available databases representing carnivores, ungulates, and primate host [...]
Construction costs and tradeoffs in carnivorous pitcher plant leaves: towards a pitcher leaf economic spectrum
Published: 2024-12-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Abstract • Background Leaf economic theory holds that physiological constraints to photosynthesis have a role in the coordinated evolution of multiple leaf traits, an idea that can be extended to carnivorous plants occupying a particular trait space that is constrained by key costs and benefits. Pitcher traps are modified leaves that may face steep photosynthetic costs: a high-volume, [...]
Cryptic ontogenetic changes in the ventral coloration of a colour polymorphic wall lizard (Podarcis muralis)
Published: 2024-12-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
During growth, many animals undergo irreversible colour changes. Despite their ecological and ethological relevance, ontogenetic colour changes (OCCs) are often overlooked. The problem is compounded when OCCs involve wavelengths invisible to humans. Wall lizards can perceive ultraviolet (UV) light, and their conspicuous ventral and ventrolateral coloration —including UV-reflecting patches— likely [...]
Intraspecific variation and detectability of iridescence in the dorsal coloration of a wall lizard
Published: 2024-12-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Iridescence refers to the optical property of surfaces for which reflected wavelengths depend on viewing geometry. Although iridescence underlies some of the most striking animal colours, the sensory stimulation elicited by iridescent spectral shifts in relevant observers has seldom been explored. Wall lizards often show substantial intraspecific colour variation, which may influence the [...]
Amazonian and Andean tree communities are not tracking current climate warming
Published: 2024-12-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is shifting species distributions, leading to changes in community composition and novel species assemblages worldwide. However, the responses of tropical forests to climate change across large-scale environmental gradients remain largely unexplored. Using long-term data over 66,000 trees of more than 2,500 species occurring over 3,500 m elevation along the hyperdiverse [...]
Wood density variation across an Andes-to-Amazon elevational gradient
Published: 2024-12-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
1. Understanding how functional traits are related to species diversity and ecosystem properties is a central goal of ecology. Wood density is a trait that integrates many aspects of plant form and function and is highly variable among species. Previous studies of wood density across elevational gradients have been based on limited sampling and have reported declines with increasing elevation, [...]
Improving Aboveground Biomass Estimates with 3D Tree Crown Parameters from UAV-LS in Beech Forests
Published: 2024-12-17
Subjects: Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Accurate estimates of aboveground biomass (AGB) are essential for forest policies to reduce carbon emissions. Unmanned aerial laser scanning (UAV-LS) offers unprecedented millimetric detail but is underutilized in monitoring broadleaf Mediterranean forests compared to coniferous ones. This study aims to design and evaluate a procedure for AGB estimates based on the predictive power of crown [...]
Antechodynamics and Antechokinetics: Dynamics and Kinetics of Antibiotic Resistance Molecules
Published: 2024-12-16
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
Pharmacology of antimicrobial drugs comprises pharmacodynamics (PD) and pharmacokinetics (PK). PD refers to studying drugs' mode of action at different concentrations on their molecular targets and the resulting effect(s). PK refers to studying the way(s) by which drugs enter and are distributed to reach their targets in different compartments (such as tissues in the body) and how the local drug [...]