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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences

Growth decline in European beech associated with temperature-driven increase in reproductive allocation

Andrew Hacket-Pain, Jakub Szymkowiak, Valentin Journe, et al.

Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Life Sciences

Climate change is impacting forests in complex ways, with indirect effects arising from interactions between tree growth and reproduction often overlooked. Our 43-year study of European beech (Fagus sylvatica), showed that rising summer temperatures since 2005 have led to more frequent seed production events. This shift increases reproductive effort but depletes the trees' stored resources due to [...]

Intraspecific competition along different life stages can stabilize coexistence among dragonflies and damselflies

Gabrielle Cristina Pestana, Frederico Zanatta, Eduarda Saciloti, et al.

Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Life Sciences

Biodiversity is sustained by stabilizing mechanisms of coexistence that inhibit species of competitive exclusion. Yet, in organisms with complex life cycles competitive dynamics may vary according to the life stage. Dragonflies are optimal organisms to test these ideas, as aquatic larvae are generalists in their feeding behavior, but adults have a wide variety of sexual behaviors. In this way, we [...]

Widespread decline of ground beetles in Germany

Shawan Chowdhury, Diana E. Bowler, Estève Boutaud, et al.

Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences

Many insect species are facing existential crises, primarily due to diverse human-induced activities. Most insect assessments, however, are based on short-term data or some iconic species. Here, in close collaboration with taxonomic experts from natural history societies, we compiled the best available occurrence data for ground beetles in Germany, estimated the changes in species occupancy over [...]

How might turbulence affect animal flight in a changing world?

Emily Shepard

Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Life Sciences

Scaling in Nervous Systems

Jose Ignacio Arroyo, Van Savage, Paheli Desai-Chowdhry, et al.

Published: 2024-09-13
Subjects: Life Sciences

On the Origin of Nightjars (Caprimulgidae): Perspectives from the Fossil Record

Albert Chen, Daniel J. Field

Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology

Fossils represent the only direct evidence for the ancestral morphologies, antiquity, and historical geographic distributions of life on Earth. The fossil record of the avian clade Strisores (which includes nightjars, oilbirds, potoos, frogmouths, owlet-nightjars, treeswifts, swifts, and hummingbirds) has been richly documented by avian standards, with well-corroborated stem-group representatives [...]

The radiation and geographic expansion of primates through diverse climates

Jorge Avaria-Llautureo, Thomas A Püschel, Andrew Meade, et al.

Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

One of the most influential hypotheses about primate evolution postulates that their origin, radiation, and major dispersals were associated with exceptionally warm conditions in tropical forests at northern latitudes (henceforth the warm tropical forest hypothesis). However, this notion has proven difficult to test given the overall uncertainty about both geographic locations and paleoclimates [...]

A Practical Guide to Quantifying Ecological Coexistence

Adam T Clark, Lauren Glenny Shoemaker, Jean-François Arnoldi, et al.

Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Coexistence is simultaneously one of the most fundamental concepts of ecology, and one of the most difficult to define and quantify. A particular challenge is that, despite a well-developed body of research on the subject, several different schools of thought have developed over the past century, leading to multiple independent, and largely isolated, branches of literature with distinct [...]

Urban refugia enhance persistence of an endangered endemic keystone lizard threatened by the rapid spread of an invasive predator

Marc Vez-Garzón, Sandra Moreno, Guillem Casbas, et al.

Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology

Urbanization shapes global patterns of biodiversity. While often driving biodiversity loss and biotic homogenization, urban areas could paradoxically act as refugia for species threatened by other global change drivers, such as biological invasions. Despite growing interest in their conservation potential, a lack of robust empirical studies unveiling how urban refugia emerge and contribute to [...]

Masting ontogeny: the largest masting benefits accrue to the largest trees

Jakub Szymkowiak, Andrew Hacket-Pain, Dave Kelly, et al.

Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Background and Aims. Both plants and animals display considerable variation in their phenotypic traits as they grow. This variation helps organisms to adapt to specific challenges at different stages of development. Masting, the variable and synchronized seed production across years by a population of plants, is a common reproductive strategy in perennial plants that can enhance reproductive [...]

The greatest extinction event in 66 million years?

Jack H Hatfield, Bethany Allen, Tadhg Carroll, et al.

Published: 2024-09-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Biological communities are changing rapidly in response to human activities, with the high rate of vertebrate species extinction leading many to propose that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event. Five past mass extinction events have most commonly been emphasised across the Phanerozoic, with the last occurring at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. Life on Earth has, [...]

Life history shapes variation in egg composition in the blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus

Cristina-Maria Valcu, Richard Scheltema, Ralf Schweiggert, et al.

Published: 2024-09-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Maternal investment directly shapes early developmental conditions and therefore has long-term fitness consequences for the offspring. In oviparous species prenatal maternal investment is fixed at the time of laying. To ensure the best survival chances for most of their offspring, females must equip their eggs with the resources required to perform well under various circumstances, yet the actual [...]

Adaptive sampling for ecological monitoring using biased data: A stratum-based approach

Oliver L. Pescott, Gary D. Powney, Rob James Boyd

Published: 2024-09-10
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Indicators of biodiversity change across large extents of geographic, temporal and taxonomic space are frequent products of various types of ecological monitoring and other data collection efforts. Unfortunately, many such indicators are based on data that are highly unlikely to be representative of the intended statistical populations. Where there is full control over sampling processes, [...]

Harnessing social media data to track species range shifts

Shawan Chowdhury, Niloy Hawladar, Ripon C Roy, et al.

Published: 2024-09-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences

Biodiversity monitoring programs and citizen science data remain heavily biased towards the Global North. Incorporating social media data can complement existing gaps, especially in megadiverse countries with limited records, but whether such data can significantly improve our understanding of range-shifting species is unknown. Here, we collated locality data from Flickr and Facebook, in addition [...]

The difficulty of inferring process from pattern - sex ratio adaptation with helpers at the nest

Mirjam Borger, Franz J. Weissing, Hanno Hildenbrandt, et al.

Published: 2024-09-09
Subjects: Life Sciences

The possibility that animals can adaptively adjust their offspring sex ratio has intrigued biologists since Darwin. While the population sex ratio is expected to be equal in many species, it was later also hypothesised that parents should adjust their offspring sex ratio based on their situation (e.g. parental condition, temperature, timing within the breeding season, territory quality, [...]

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