Skip to main content

Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences

Navigating the complexities of “One Health”

Chadi M Saad-Roy, Wayne Marcus Getz

Published: 2024-08-27
Subjects: Life Sciences

For two decades, a One Health approach to managing the emergence of novel zoonotic pathogens has been increasingly called for by the animal and public health sectors. One health systems require the integration of data from wildlife indicator species, domesticated animals, and humans into a framework of monitoring and analysis that provides for early warning of impending pathogen spillover and [...]

A novel method to study the ecological role of sleep in small mammals.

Paul-Antoine Libourel, Sebastien Arthaud, Antoine Bergel, et al.

Published: 2024-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences

Sleep, is a complex, vital, and universal behavior that strongly differs from mere inactivity. Its ecological role remains, however, largely unknown mostly owing to the lack of methodological tools to record animal sleep states in the wild. By using a small, low power consumption biologger, capable of recording brain activity, body movements, and core physiology, we were able to record and [...]

Current knowledge on the novel semiarid photovoltaic ecosystems and their impacts on biodiversity

Esperanza C. Iranzo, José Manuel Nicolau, Ramón Reiné, et al.

Published: 2024-08-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is fundamental to mitigate the effects of global climate change. Renewable power capacity is increasing globally, and solar photovoltaic will be the dominant renewable energy source by 2050. Photovoltaic parks require great extensions of land, usually in drylands. But both ecosystems created by solar parks and the effect of solar parks [...]

Dormancy in the origin, evolution, and persistence of life on Earth

Kevin D Webster, Jay T Lennon

Published: 2024-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences

Life has existed on Earth for most of the planet's history, yet major gaps and unresolved questions remain about how it first arose and persisted. Early Earth posed numerous challenges, including harsh, noisy, and fluctuating environments. Today, many organisms cope with such conditions by entering a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity, a phenomenon known as dormancy. This process [...]

Multilevel societies: different tasks at different social levels

Ettore Camerlenghi, Danai Papageorgiou

Published: 2024-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences

Multilevel vertebrate societies, characterised by nested social units, allow individuals to perform a wide range of tasks in cooperation with others beyond their core social unit. In these societies, individuals can selectively interact with specific partners from higher social levels to cooperatively perform distinct tasks. Alternatively, social units of the same level can merge to form [...]

Reversing the North American bumblebee decline: Looking at farming practices could be a solution

Jimmy Videle

Published: 2024-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences

Wild bee declines have been documented worldwide, particularly in bumblebees, with some species in Nort America declining over 90% in the last 20 years. Climate change, land-use change from agriculture, pesticide use, and apiculture are the main drivers. The 2.2-hectare farm La ferme de l’Aube is the research site of a larger 3,082-hectare biodiversity reserve. The study area saw a 340% increase [...]

60 million years of ecological shifts in large herbivore communities revealed by Network Analysis

Fernando Blanco, Ignacio A. Lazagabaster, Oscar Sanisidro, et al.

Published: 2024-08-17
Subjects: Life Sciences

The fossil record provides direct evidence for the behavior of biological systems over millions of years. In doing so, paleontological information becomes a key source to study the evolution of ecosystems and how they responded to major environmental shifts. Using network analysis over a dataset of worldwide large herbivores spanning the past 60 Myr, we found that large herbivore assemblages [...]

Phylogeny of Weinmannia (Cunoniaceae) reveals the Contribution of the Southern Extratropics to Tropical Andean Biodiversity.

Ricardo Andres Segovia

Published: 2024-08-17
Subjects: Life Sciences

The Andes are a relatively young mountain range with impressive biodiversity, but the biogeographic processes underlying its hyperdiversity are still being unraveled. Novel mid- to high-elevation climates may have served as a biological corridor for the immigration of temperate-adapted lineages to lower latitudes, contributing unknown levels of diversity to this region. We tested the hypothesis [...]

IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Tropical Southwestern Pacific

Sarah L. Robin, Joanna C. Ellison, Cyril Marchand, et al.

Published: 2024-08-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Mangroves of the Tropical Southwestern Pacific are a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Central and Southern Great Barrier Reef, Coral Sea, Fiji Islands, New Caledonia, Tonga Islands, Torres Strait Northern Great Barrier Reef, and Vanuatu. The Tropical Southwestern Pacific province mapped extent in 2020 was 874.0 [...]

IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of The Western India and Pakistan

Waqar Ahmed, Shalini Dhyani, Ena Suarez

Published: 2024-08-13
Subjects: Life Sciences

Mangroves of the Western India and Pakistan is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Western India and Pakistan. According to global data the Western India and Pakistan mangrove province mapped extent in 2020 was 1625.3 km2, representing 1.1% of the global mangrove area, while national and regional studies [...]

The role of meiotic drive in chromosome number disparity between heterosporous and homosporous plants

Sylvia Kinosian, Michael S Barker

Published: 2024-08-13
Subjects: Life Sciences

In vascular plants, heterosporous lineages typically have fewer chromosomes than homosporous lineages. The underlying mechanism causing this disparity has been debated for over half a century. Although reproductive mode has been identified as critical to these patterns, the symmetry of meiosis during sporogenesis has been overlooked as a potential cause of the difference in chromosome numbers. In [...]

Evaluating drivers and predictability of catch composition in a highly mixed trawl fishery using stacked and joint species models

James A Smith, Daniel Johnson

Published: 2024-08-13
Subjects: Life Sciences

Evaluating drivers and the predictability of catch is valuable for the management of mixed fisheries. Drivers can represent or help to identify levers for management and predictable catch compositions are a key component of simulation tools and dynamic management strategies. But modelling mixed fisheries can be challenging due to the large number of taxa, and analysis typically focuses on a few [...]

The macroecology of knowledge: Spatio-temporal patterns of name-bearing types in biodiversity science

Gabriel Nakamura, Bruno Henrique Stabile, Livia Estéfane Frateles, et al.

Published: 2024-08-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences

Ecological and evolutionary processes are recognized as the main factors generating and maintaining biodiversity. However, how biodiversity knowledge is collated, organized, and distributed worldwide influences our perceptions and inferences about biodiversity and the underlying processes. We demonstrated that name-bearing type specimens (NBT), the most fundamental reference for the identity of [...]

No support for honest signalling of male quality in zebra finch song

Martin Bulla, Wolfgang Forstmeier

Published: 2024-08-12
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Ornithology

Alam et al.1 claim to have discovered a song feature, “path length”, that honestly signals male fitness and is therefore preferred by all females. However, their data and analyses provide no statistical support for this claim. (1) The key finding — that long-path songs are difficult to learn (Fig. 4c) — is a statistical artefact: regressing y minus x on x creates an illusory effect where none [...]

Experimental evidence that phenotypic evolution but not plasticity occurs along genetic lines of least resistance in homogeneous environments

Greg M Walter

Published: 2024-08-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Genetic correlations concentrate genetic variation in certain directions of the multivariate phenotype. Adaptation and, under some models, plasticity is expected to occur in the direction of the phenotype containing the greatest amount of genetic variation (gmax). However, this may hinge upon environmental heterogeneity, which can affect patterns of genetic variation. I use experimental evolution [...]

search

You can search by:

  • Title
  • Keywords
  • Author Name
  • Author Affiliation