Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Species’ environmental niches are conventionally modelled using coarse-grained macroclimate data. These data are known to deviate substantially from local, near-ground and proximal conditions (i.e., the microclimate), especially so below forests canopies. Here we aimed to assess the impact of using gridded microclimate data instead of gridded macroclimate data on the performance of species [...]
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mutualistic interactions between plants and soil fungi, mycorrhizae, control carbon and nutrient fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. Soil of ecosystems featuring a particular type of mycorrhiza exhibit specific properties across multiple dimensions of soil functioning. The knowledge about the impacts of mycorrhizal fungi on soil functioning accumulated so far, indicates that these impacts are of [...]
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biological differences between males and females lead to many differences in physiology, disease, and overall health. One of the most prominent disparities is in the number of germline mutations passed to offspring: human males transmit three times as many mutations as do females. While the classic explanation for this pattern invokes differences in post-puberty germline replication between the [...]
Published: 2023-05-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Leaf size varies within and between species, and previous work has linked this variation to the environment and evolutionary history separately. However, many previous studies fail to interlink both factors and are often data limited. To address this, our study developed a new workflow using machine learning to automate the extraction of leaf traits (leaf area, largest in-circle area and leaf [...]
Published: 2023-05-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Genomic structural variation, genomic rearrangements and karyotype variants are important components on which evolution acts in addition to single nucleotide variants, which are the most common type of variant being studied since the rise of next generation sequencing. These variants have unique mutational mechanisms and evolutionary consequences compared to single nucleotide variants. Here we [...]
Published: 2023-05-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The basic concern of the general theory of evolution is to understand the entire evolution from the origin of life to the biological, technological, social, and economic structures of the present from a unified point of view and structure. The general theory of evolution can be seen as a comprehensive generalization and extension of Darwin's theory of evolution. It goes far beyond [...]
Published: 2023-05-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Reproductive performance in birds can be affected by both social environment and small-scale environmental heterogeneity via food abundance, availability of nesting sites, and predation risk. However, to date, the best studies of effects of microhabitat variation on avian populations have been on northern hemisphere passerines using nestboxes, where birds have limited control over nest sites [...]
Published: 2023-04-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
The strategies that animals employ to track resources through space and time are central to their ecology and ability to adapt to environmental variation. These spatiotemporal movement patterns also reflect underlying ecosystem phenology. In ecosystems influenced by seasonal variation in solar angle, the fitness of diverse taxa depends on seasonal movements to track resources along latitudinal or [...]
Published: 2023-04-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Background: The Cactaceae family displays remarkable diversity in the morphology of extrafloral nectaries (EFNs). Despite their taxonomic, ecological, and evolutionary significance, their anatomy and morphology are poorly understood. Questions: How are the morphological and anatomical attributes of extrafloral nectaries in Opuntia streptacantha and Ferocactus recurvus? Studied species: Opuntia [...]
Published: 2023-04-27
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Developing countries such as the Philippines suffer from a lack of policy development and implementation on wastewater treatment and discharge. Chlorella vulgaris is a microscopic green algae that has been employed in other countries for WWT due to its ability to simultaneously reduce pollutants and produce valuable biomass. However, challenges in technology adaptation such as differential [...]
Published: 2023-04-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
In the age of big data, it is essential to remember that the size of a dataset is not all that matters. This is particularly true where the goal is to draw inferences about some wider population, in which case it is far more important that the data are representative of that population. It is possible to adjust unrepresentative samples so that they more closely resemble the population in terms of [...]
Published: 2023-04-25
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Many animals utilize self-built structures – so-called extended phenotypes – to enhance body functions, such as thermoregulation, prey capture or defence. Yet, it is unclear whether the evolution of animal constructions supplements or substitutes body functions. Here, using Austral brown spiders, we explored if the evolutionary loss and gain of silken webs as extended prey capture devices [...]
Published: 2023-04-25
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Novel biotic interactions in shifting communities play a key role in determining the ability of species’ ranges to track suitable habitat. To date, the impact of biotic interactions on range dynamics have predominantly been studied in the context of interactions between different trophic levels or, to a lesser extent, exploitative competition between species of the same trophic level. Yet, both [...]
Published: 2023-04-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Flying squirrels have important roles in ecosystems; as a disperser of seeds and spores. However, flying squirrel species which strongly depend on old mature forests are declined in abundance as a result of logging of mature forests. Guidelines for the conservation of flying squirrels have been developed, but it is important to have an accurate and deeply understanding of their ecology in order [...]
Published: 2023-04-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Forest management has a strong impact on the forest structure and subsequently on the biotic and abiotic forest understorey environment. Forest understorey herbs can thus be expected to evolutionary respond to management-induced environmental variation (provided sufficient time for adaptation), but this has been little tested to date. Here we use a common garden, to test for genetically based [...]