Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Drivers of phenotypic variation along a Late Pleistocene range expansion route
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how interindividual variation within populations drives the evolution of biodiversity patterns is a major challenge in ecology and evolutionary biology. By reshuffling species distribution in space and time, historical biogeographic processes have dramatically affected the structure of biodiversity. While the genetic legacy left by these historical processes within populations has [...]
Deciphering probabilistic species interaction networks
Published: 2024-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Representing species interactions probabilistically (how likely are they to occur?) as opposed to deterministically (are they occurring?) conveys uncertainties in our knowledge of interactions and information on their variability. The sources of uncertainty captured by interaction probabilities depend on the method used to evaluate them: uncertainty of predictive models, subjective assessment of [...]
Temperature-dependent differences in male and female life history responses to a period of food limitation during development
Published: 2024-07-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
With climate change, animals face both rising temperatures and more variable food availability. Many species have evolved an adaptative response to historic variation in food availability: they grow faster after a period of diet restriction (“compensatory growth”). However, higher temperatures may reduce the capacity for compensatory growth in ectotherms because individuals require more resources [...]
Bimodal seasonal activity of moths and elevation, weather and land use as drivers of their diversity
Published: 2024-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Moths are an important part of terrestrial insect diversity and contribute substantially to ecosys-tem functioning. Yet, how their activity varies with the season and how different biotic and abiotic factors (elevation, weather, land use) are simultaneously linked to moth community characteristics are still poorly understood. We analysed a vast moth community dataset from Switzerland collected by [...]
Biodiversity research in India: a bibliometric overview
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
As one of the ‘megadiverse’ countries, biodiversity research in India is not only important, specifically for India, but also for the world. To investigate the condition of biodiversity in the Indian academic literature, bibliometric analysis was employed. The Web of Science Core Collection provided data (2000–2023). Out of a preliminary set of 1090 publications, 223 were finalised with a focus [...]
Disentangling variational bias: the roles of development, mutation and selection
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The extraordinary diversity and adaptive fit of organisms to their environment depends fundamentally on the availability of variation. While many evolutionary studies assume that random mutations produce isotropic phenotypic variation, the distribution of variation available to natural selection is more restricted, as the distribution of phenotypic variation is affected by a range of factors in [...]
Repeatability and intra-class correlations from time-to-event data: towards a standardized approach
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Many biological features are expressed as “time-to-event” traits, such as time to first reproduction or response to some stimulus. The analysis of these traits frequently produces right-censored data in cases where no event has occurred within a certain timeframe. The Cox proportional hazards (CPH) model, a type of survival analysis, accounts for censored data by estimating the hazard of an event [...]
An unrecognized genetic predisposition for sperm competition in aphids
Published: 2024-07-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
A hitherto unrecognized genetic predisposition for sperm competition exists in aphids. The females of a clone are diploid for the autosomes and sex chromosomes: AA/XX (where A stands for a haploid set of autosomes). Production of males is parthenogenetic, except for the random loss of one X chromosome. Male offspring is diploid for the autosomes but haploid for the sex chromosomes (AA/X0). Hence, [...]
Accelerating ecosystem monitoring through computer vision with deep metric learning
Published: 2024-07-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Feature extraction from environmental observation data based on deep learning models has made significant progress. However, the current methods may not be optimal because of the increasing volume of data, complexity of data characteristics, and labeled data limitations. In this study, we focused on deep metric learning as a new application for environmental observation data to overcome these [...]
A pilot analysis shows that climatic conditions and resource availability along tropical and temperate gradients of the Americas impact the co-occurrence pattern of nectarivorous species
Published: 2024-07-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Abstract Aim While biodiversity trends and patterns are shaped by both biotic interactions and abiotic factors, biodiversity may vary in space and time when responding to environmental conditions across clines. However, we lack the knowledge of how biotic and abiotic factors determine species co-occurrence to influence community assemblage that can impact biodiversity trends and patterns across [...]
Scanning the skies for migrants: Conservation-focused opportunities for a pan-European automated telemetry network
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Accelerated biodiversity loss during the Anthropocene has destabilised functional links within and between ecosystems. Migratory species that cross different ecosystems on their repeated journeys between breeding and non-breeding sites are particularly sensitive to global change because they are exposed to various, often ecosystem-specific threats. As these bring both lethal and non-lethal [...]
Precision Pathway Engineering in Plants: Enhancing Crop Resilience and Productivity for Sustainable Agriculture
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Recent advancements in metabolic engineering have opened new avenues for addressing critical challenges in agriculture, nutrition, and sustainability. This study explores innovative strategies for manipulating plant metabolic pathways to enhance crop yield, nutritional value, stress tolerance, and the production of high-value compounds. We present novel findings on improving photosynthetic [...]
Assisted colonisation for ecosystem function: a thought experiment for the British Isles
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Climate change is driving the rapid reorganisation of the world’s biota as species shift their ranges to track suitable conditions, however habitat fragmentation and other barriers hinder this adaptive response for species with limited dispersal ability. The translocation of species into newly suitable areas to which they are unable to disperse naturally has been suggested to conserve species [...]
Experimental evolution of a mammalian holobiont: the genetic and maternal effects in bank voles selected for herbivorous capability
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mammalian herbivory represents a complex adaptation requiring evolutionary changes across all levels of biological organization, from molecules to morphology to behavior. Explaining the evolution of such complex traits represents a major challenge in biology, simultaneously muddled and enlightened by a growing awareness of the crucial role of symbiotic associations in shaping organismal [...]
Lack of parental mate-switching effects on offspring fitness components in a long-lived socially monogamous species
Published: 2024-07-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
In many species, individuals form socially monogamous pair-bonds lasting multiple breeding seasons, or even whole lifetimes. Studies often suggest social monogamy to be adaptive, but this is usually quantified through the survival and annual reproductive success of the partners. However, beyond the number of offspring produced, parental partnerships may also affect their offspring’s phenotype, [...]