Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Historic residential segregation impacts biodiversity data availability disparately across the tree of life
Published: 2024-04-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Race and Ethnicity, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Urbanization alters species ranges and nature’s contributions to people, motivating urban conservation. Residential segregation policies have left an indelible impact on urban environments, greenspaces, and wildlife communities, creating socioeconomic heterogeneity and altering biota. However, the extent to which data sufficiently capture urban biodiversity patterns remains unclear, especially [...]
THE CURRENT KNOWLEDGE OF TUBERCULOSIS IN PINNIPEDS
Published: 2024-04-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Infectious diseases and zoonoses, particularly, are in the spotlight after the 17 COVID-19 pandemic. Under this scenario, the One Health approach becomes of fundamental relevance to understanding, analyzing, interpreting, and, ideally, preventing future scenarios of the spread of infectious agents. It is estimated that about 60% of human infectious diseases are caused by zoonotic agents. A clear [...]
Leveraging AI to improve evidence synthesis in conservation
Published: 2024-04-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Systematic evidence syntheses (systematic reviews and maps) summarize knowledge and are used to support decisions and policies in a variety of applied fields, from medicine and public health to biodiversity conservation. However, conducting these exercises in conservation is often expensive and slow, which can impede their use and hamper progress in addressing the biodiversity crisis. With the [...]
Using causal diagrams and superpopulation models to correct geographic biases in biodiversity monitoring data
Published: 2024-04-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Biodiversity monitoring schemes periodically measure species’ abundances and distributions at a sample of sites to understand how they have changed over time. Often, the aim is to infer change in an average sense across some wider landscape. Inference to the wider landscape is simple if the species’ abundances and distributions are similar at sampled to non-sampled locations. Otherwise, the [...]
How can biodiversity strategy and action plans incorporate genetic diversity concerns, plans, policies, capacity, and commitments?
Published: 2024-04-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Globally, national, subnational, and supranational entities are creating Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans, to develop concrete commitments and actions to curb biodiversity loss, meet international obligations and achieve a society in harmony with nature. In light of policy makers' increasing recognition of genetic diversity in helping species and ecosystems adapt and be resilient during [...]
The natural history of luck: A synthesis study of structured population models
Published: 2024-04-13
Subjects: Life Sciences, Population Biology
Chance pervades life. In turn, life histories are described by probabilities (e.g., survival, breeding) and averages across individuals (e.g., mean growth rate, age at maturity). In this study, we explored patterns of luck in lifetime outcomes by analyzing structured population models for a wide array of plant and animal species. We calculated four response variables: variance and skewness in [...]
MetaR, a global database on metabolic rates of ectotherms
Published: 2024-04-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Whole-organism metabolic rate is a key trait for understanding ectotherms’ responses to ongoing environmental change. It represents the interface through which organisms interact with their environment and therefore allows for making predictions across various levels of biological organisation. While much of the variation in metabolic rates is explained by body size and temperature, a [...]
The global protected area network does not harbor genetically diverse populations
Published: 2024-04-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Evolution, Life Sciences
Global biodiversity conservation targets include expanding protected areas and maintaining genetic diversity within species by 2030. However, the extent to which existing protected areas capture genetic diversity within species is unclear. We examined this question using a global sample of nuclear population-level genetic data comprising georeferenced genotypes from 2,513 local populations, [...]
Effectiveness of toxic baiting for the control of canines and felines
Published: 2024-04-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Toxic baiting has been widely adopted for the control of exotic canines and felines. However, high variability in findings make it difficult to gauge the overall efficacy of this control method. We conducted a meta-analysis of the efficacy of baiting for the feral cat, red fox and dingo; our outcome of interest was apparent predator survival. Our dataset contained 121 effects from 34 studies, [...]
A Review of Factors Affecting Farmed Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) Welfare in Australia and Beyond
Published: 2024-04-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
With the increasingly global scale and scope of aquaculture, the need to match this development with improvements in fish welfare is a central societal and industry goal. We provide a comprehensive assessment of the farmed Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) literature with targeted examples focusing on Atlantic salmon farmed in Tasmania, Australia. We synthesise insights from both small- and [...]
Why there are so many definitions of fitness in models
Published: 2024-04-12
Subjects: Biology, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Population Biology
“Fitness” quantifies the ability to survive and reproduce, but is operationalized in many different ways. Generally, short-term fitness (e.g., expected number of surviving offspring) is assigned to genotypes or phenotypes, and used to non-trivially derive longer-term operationalizations of fitness (e.g. fixation probability or sojourn time), providing insight as to which organismal strategies [...]
A complex interplay between natural and anthropogenic factors shapes plant diversity patterns in Mediterranean coastal dunes
Published: 2024-04-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Context A long history of human colonisation has profoundly altered Mediterranean coastal dunes, as well as their capacity of providing ecosystem services important for human well-being. The provisioning of these services depends on the integrity of the dune system, which is formed and maintained by coastal plant communities. Analysing the drivers of plant diversity is thus crucial for preserving [...]
Adaptive potential in the face of a transmissible cancer in Tasmanian devils
Published: 2024-04-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) cause catastrophic declines in wildlife populations, but 2 also generate selective pressures that may result in rapid evolutionary responses. One such EID 3 is devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) in the Tasmanian devil. DFTD is almost always fatal, 4 which likely causes strong selection for traits that reduce susceptibility to the disease, but 5 population [...]
Functional team selection: a framework for local adaptation in plants and their belowground microbiomes
Published: 2024-04-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Plants and their microbiomes are complex adaptive systems consisting of host plants and a dynamic network of associated microorganisms inside and around plant tissues. This article introduces Functional Team Selection (FTS) as a framework to help envision and study the movement of matter, energy, and information within plant-microbiome systems. FTS embraces the fact that belowground, plants are [...]
The destructive sampling conundrum and guidelines for effective and ethical sampling of herbaria
Published: 2024-04-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
The use of herbaria for science and conservation is revolutionizing the discovery, exploration, and protection of biodiversity at unprecedented scopes and scales. The Global Metaherbarium—a digitally interlinked, open-access resource—is stimulating these efforts and helping to facilitate massive investigations that utilize aggregated digital derivatives of physical herbarium [...]