Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Endocrine flexibility can facilitate or constrain the ability to cope with global change.
Published: 2023-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Global climate change has increased average environmental temperatures world-wide, simultaneously intensifying temperature variability and extremes. Growing numbers of studies have documented phenological, behavioral, and morphological responses to climate change in wild populations. As systemic signals, hormones can contribute to orchestrating many of these phenotypic changes. Yet little is [...]
Industrial fishing compliance with a new marine corridor near the Galapagos Islands
Published: 2023-10-30
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Examining fishing pressure in under-resourced marine regions still presents a challenge to understanding patterns of fishing pressure. These issues are compounded in areas with complex marine zoning regulations or those that have changed over time. Satellite-based positioning tracking of fishing vessels has helped identify ocean-wide fishing effort distribution and potential encroachments into [...]
The dispersal potential of endangered plants versus non-native garden escapees
Published: 2023-10-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Amidst global challenges like climate change, plant dispersal corridors are essential. In human-dominated landscapes, urban and rural green spaces are key dispersal avenues. Non-native plants are known to benefit from these, yet the potential benefits for endangered plants remain unclear. To address this question, I compared dispersal traits of endangered native plants with those of [...]
Delivering on a promise: Futureproofing automated insect monitoring methods
Published: 2023-10-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Due to rapid technological innovations, the automated monitoring of insect assemblages comes within reach. However, this continuous innovation endangers the methodological continuity needed for calculating reliable biodiversity trends in the future. Maintaining methodological continuity over prolonged periods of time is not trivial, since technology improves, reference libraries grow, and both [...]
Global research priorities for historical ecology to inform conservation
Published: 2023-10-26
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Historical ecology draws on a broad range of information sources and methods to provide insight into ecological and social change, especially over the past ~12,000 years. While its results are often relevant to conservation and restoration, insights from its diverse disciplines, environments, and geographies have frequently remained siloed or underrepresented, restricting their full potential. [...]
Uneven genetic data limits biodiversity assessments in protected areas globally
Published: 2023-10-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Policy, Genetics, Life Sciences
Increasing the extent of protected areas (PA) through 30x30 and other area-based conservation initiatives can help to achieve global biodiversity conservation goals across all biodiversity levels. However, intraspecific genetic variation, the foundational level of biodiversity, is rarely explicitly considered in PA design or quality performance assessments. Repurposing existing genetic data could [...]
Neglected biodiversity and ecological functioning – fish community structure associated with Antipatharia (black corals) on shallow reef ecosystems
Published: 2023-10-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Addressing anthropogenic threats compromising the persistence of tropical marine ecosystems requires an understanding of the fundamental ecological functions these organisms fulfil. Habitat provision is a major function of corals in tropical marine ecosystems, although most research in this area has concentrated on scleractinians (hard corals). Here, we provide one of the first empirical studies [...]
Integration of multimodal cues does not alter mean but reduces among-study variance in avian responses to predators: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Published: 2023-10-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Despite a wealth of studies documenting prey responses to perceived predation risk, researchers have only recently begun to consider how prey integrate information from multiple cues in their assessment of risk. We conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies that experimentally manipulated perceived predation risk in birds and evaluate support for three alternative models of cue [...]
When the microbiome shapes the host: immune evolution implications for infectious disease
Published: 2023-10-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Evolution, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Pathogenic Microbiology
The microbiome includes both “mutualist” and “pathogen” microbes, regulated by the same innate immune architecture. A major question has therefore been: how do hosts prevent pathogenic infections while maintaining beneficial microbes? One idea suggests hosts can selectively activate innate immunity upon pathogenic infection, but not mutualist colonisation. Another idea posits that hosts can [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystem assessment: Tropical glacier ecosystem of the Cordillera de Mérida
Published: 2023-10-23
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Life Sciences
This document uses the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems guidelines to diagnose the collapse of the Tropical glacier ecosystems of the Cordillera de Mérida in Venezuela. Tropical glaciers are rapidly disappearing, particularly in isolated mountain peaks and lower elevations. These glaciers are fundamental substrates for unique cryogenic ecosystems in tropical environments where the ice, melting [...]
Treating gaps and biases in biodiversity data as a missing data problem
Published: 2023-10-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Big biodiversity datasets have great potential for monitoring and research because of their large taxonomic, geographic and temporal scope. Such datasets have become especially important for assessing the temporal change of species’ populations and distributions. Gaps in the available data, however, often hinder drawing large-scale inferences about species’ trends. Here, we conceptualise [...]
Mobilising central bank digital currency to bend the curve of biodiversity loss
Published: 2023-10-21
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Humanity is at a critical juncture. Despite our efforts to set targets and goals, biodiversity and climate are both changing rapidly, pushing us towards a biosphere our species has not known. To solve this problem one view is that we need transformational change of the economic paradigm, but that might be more an ideal than pragmatic. A new idea could be to take inspiration from recent [...]
How structural variants shape avian phenotypes: lessons from model systems
Published: 2023-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite receiving significant recent attention, the relevance of Structural Variation (SV) in driving phenotypic diversity remains understudied. Advances in long-read sequencing, bioinformatics and pangenomic approaches, enhance SV detection. We review the role of SVs in shaping phenotypes in avian model systems, and identify general patterns in SV type, length, and their associated traits. [...]
Integrating ecological feedbacks across scales and levels of organization
Published: 2023-10-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
In ecosystems, species interact in various ways with other species, and with their local environment. In addition, ecosystems are coupled in space by diverse types of flows. From these links connecting different ecological entities can emerge circular pathways of indirect effects: feedback loops. This contributes to creating a nested set of ecological feedbacks operating at different [...]
Darwinian Pond System as a Model for the Establishment of Life on the Archaian Earth
Published: 2023-10-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
The main doubt that exists about the appearance and subsequent development of life on earth, regardless of whether its origin is due to panspermia or abiogenesis processes, is related to the necessary conditions so that, once implanted or synthesized, life can be established and prosper. Following the idea proposed by Darwin in 1873 that the origin of life took place in "warm shallow pools" [...]