Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
The Deadly Trio: Do warming, acidification & deoxygenation destabilize the anemone-algae symbiosis?
Published: 2024-11-04
Subjects: Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences
Anthropogenic climate change is primarily driven by carbon dioxide release, which causes a domino effect of warming, acidification, and hypoxia in aquatic habitats. Using a fully-crossed experimental design, we investigated how exposure to this “deadly trio” of environmental stressors affects the sea anemone, Exaiptasia diaphana and its endosymbiotic dinoflagellates. To mimic conditions found on [...]
Niche dynamics of alien plant species in Mediterranean Europe
Published: 2024-11-03
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Aim Humans have spread plants globally for millennia, inadvertently causing ecological disruptions. However, biological invasions also provide a unique opportunity to study the process of niche dynamics, through which species adapt their niche when confronted with novel environments. Focusing on the Mediterranean Basin, we assessed 1) which traits favour niche dynamics, and 2) whether niche [...]
Meromixis in the Anthropocene: pathways of change
Published: 2024-11-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Spider colour polymorphism is shaped by precipitation, not ambient temperature
Published: 2024-11-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Colour polymorphism, the presence of multiple colour variants within a population, is a common example of intraspecific phenotypic variation and has served as a model for studying drivers of diversity. Climatic factors can influence the distribution and abundance of colour variants, yet research often focuses on lineages where sexual selection covaries with the climate-colouration associations. [...]
Continental-scale empirical evidence for relationships between fire response strategies and fire frequency
Published: 2024-11-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Theory suggests that the dominance of resprouting and seeding, two key mechanisms through which plants persist with recurrent fire, both depend on other traits and vary with fire regime. However, these patterns remain largely untested over broad scales.We analysed the relationships between mean fire frequency, derived from MODIS satellite data, and resprouting and seeding strategies, [...]
Towards a modern and efficient European biodiversity observation network fit for multiple policies
Published: 2024-11-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
To address the biodiversity crisis, global and regional policy frameworks like the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the European Green Deal demand to monitor biodiversity. Despite these efforts, existing approaches for monitoring biodiversity remain fragmented and lack data integration. Here, we review and synthesize crucial information for developing an integrated European-wide [...]
Exploring bird biodiversity: a survey of avian richness in the dams of oke-ogun, nigeria
Published: 2024-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Wetland degradation, both natural and anthropogenic, impacts biodiversity and ecosystem services. Artificial wetlands, such as dams, may help mitigate the loss of natural wetlands, but their conservation potential is understudied. This research explores avian diversity, anthropogenic impacts, and community perceptions of bird species across three dams -Igboho, Okeho, and Kishi located in [...]
Priced out of belonging? Insufficient concessions on membership fees across international societies in ecology and evolution
Published: 2024-10-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Learned societies, as professional bodies for scientists, are an integral part of the scientific system. However, their membership fees have the potential to be prohibitive to the most vulnerable members of the scientific community. To shed light on how membership fees are structured, we conducted a survey of 182 international learned societies relevant to researchers in ecology and evolution. We [...]
Overcoming Key Challenges of Satellite-based Monitoring of Ecosystem Condition: A Continental-scale Example From Australia
Published: 2024-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Effective satellite-based monitoring of ecosystem integrity or condition needs to address four key challenges: (a) context dependency; (b) alternative ecological states; (c) short-term temporal ecosystem dynamics; and (d) scarcity of reference data where ecosystems retain high levels of integrity. Here we present a typology, and outline strengths and weaknesses, of different approaches to mapping [...]
Sodium sulfite can reliably induce chemical hypoxia without toxic effects in the model sea anemone species, Exaiptasia diaphana
Published: 2024-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is accelerating deoxygenation in aquatic ecosystems worldwide, causing consequences for aerobic organisms. Empirically studying the effects of deoxygenation on biological processes is therefore critical. Multiple methods for inducing hypoxia in physiological studies have been developed, each with pros and cons. Using oxygen scavenger chemicals, such as sodium sulfite, to reliably [...]
Decadal recovery of fungal but not termite deadwood decay in tropical rainforest
Published: 2024-10-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Deadwood represents ~11% of carbon stocks in tropical rainforest ecosystems and its decay is driven largely by fungi and termites which contribute to the cycling of carbon and nutrients. Due to land use change, such as forest clearing, secondary growth tropical rainforests are increasingly prevalent around the globe. In secondary growth rainforest, studies found lower decay rates of leaf [...]
BON in a Box: An Open and Collaborative Platform for Biodiversity Monitoring, Indicator Calculation, and Reporting
Published: 2024-10-28
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Plant Sciences
The Convention on Biological Diversity’s Kunming-Montreal Global BiodiversityFramework (GBF) sets ambitious goals to protect and restore biodiversity. It includes a Monitoring Framework that mandates countries to track progress toward these goals using indicators that summarize biodiversity trends. Calculating indicators is challenging for countries due to technical barriers, lack of available [...]
Species changes are being misperceived - especially when populations increase
Published: 2024-10-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Environmental sciences seek to provide an unbiased quantitative basis for decision making, but conservation and management, as well as personal environmentally-related decisions are often driven by personal perception of the environment. Perception, in turn, is made up of personal experiences, information exchange and media exposure, personal values and beliefs. When documented changes in the [...]
Patterns of fruit production in tropical forests are shifting with negative outnumbering positive trends
Published: 2024-10-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
The impacts of climate change and anthropogenic disturbance are increasingly evident in the structure and demographics of tropical forests, yet the response of tree reproduction remains poorly understood. As fruit and seed production is the first step in forest recruitment, this gap is critical to understanding tropical forest resilience. Tropical fruits are important in diets of numerous [...]
infinitylists: A Shiny application and R package for rapid generation of place-based species checklists
Published: 2024-10-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Premise: Online biodiversity databases like GBIF hold billions of occurrence records, including vouchered specimens and citizen science records. Integrating these two data streams facilitates more robust species checklists. However, processing huge biodiversity datasets can be time-consuming, and most databases are species-focused, rather than place-based, visualisation tools. Methods and [...]