Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Invasion trends: An interpretable measure of change is needed to support policy targets
Published: 2023-09-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) calls for a 50% reduction in rates of invasive alien species establishment by 2030. However, estimating changes in rates of introduction and establishment is far from straightforward, particularly on a national scale. Variation in survey effort over time, the absence of data on survey effort, and aspects of the invasion process itself [...]
Sources of confusion in global biodiversity trends
Published: 2023-09-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Populations and ecological communities are changing worldwide, and empirical studies exhibit a mixture of either declining or mixed trends. Confusion in global biodiversity trends thus remains while being of major social, political, and scientific importance. Part of this variability may arise from the difficulty to reliably assess global biodiversity trends. Here, we conducted a literature [...]
Plant mutations, beyond the clichés
Published: 2023-09-18
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Monitor indicators of genetic diversity from space using Earth Observation data
Published: 2023-09-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
By providing images of the globe, measured frequently across several optical domains, in the form of public data, EO has high potential to facilitate and advance biodiversity monitoring. However, there is currently a consensus that EO cannot contribute to monitoring genetic diversity. Here, we challenge this consensus by explaining how EO can help to develop the headline and complementary [...]
Towards integrating and standardising information on plant invasions across Australia
Published: 2023-09-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Over the last decades, terminology to refer to invasion status along the introduction-naturalisation-invasion continuum have been based either on overcome barriers or on impact-based frameworks, generating debates within the scientific community. The lack of agreement with regards to definitions have sometimes hampered combining information from sources based on different criteria. In Australia, [...]
Towards a unified framework for studying behavioural tolerance to anthropogenic disturbance
Published: 2023-09-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Animals vary in how much they respond to risk and the extent to which they can modify their responsiveness over time. How and why animals vary has important consequences for understanding demographic and evolutionary responses to novel or rapidly changing environments. Behavioural tolerance is seen when animals do not have any or have a limited behavioural reaction to a potentially risky [...]
Lasting effects of avian-frugivore interactions on seed dispersal and seedling establishment
Published: 2023-09-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. The consequences of plant-animal interactions often transcend the mere encounter stage, as those encounters are followed by a chain of subsequent stages on the plant’s reproductive cycle that ultimately determine fitness. Yet, the dissemination and recruitment stages of animal-mediated seed dispersal are seldom analysed jointly, hindering a full understanding of the ecology of seed [...]
Taking cues from ecological and evolutionary theories to expand the landscape of disgust
Published: 2023-09-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Behavioural avoidance of parasites in the environment generates what is known as the “landscape of disgust” (analogous to the predator-induced “landscape of fear”). Despite the potential for improving our inference of host-parasite dynamics, three limitations of the landscape of disgust restrict the insight that is gained from current research: 1) many host-parasite systems will not be [...]
Changing precipitation regime threatens population growth and persistence of a declining grassland songbird
Published: 2023-09-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
The interplay of biogeographic history, floral morphology, and climatic niche in Palicourea (Rubiaceae), an ecologically important group of Neotropical plants
Published: 2023-09-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Investigating how biotic and abiotic factors interact to shape species distributions is critical to understanding current biodiversity patterns. This is particularly relevant in the Neotropics, a species-rich region home to several biodiversity hotspots, where the interplay of factors promoting diversification resulted in the assembly of the world’s richest flora. Using Palicourea, a species-rich [...]
Limits to modeling the (thermal) limits of Wolbachia
Published: 2023-09-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Wolbachia release programs with the wMel strain are suppressing the incidence of dengue following releases in many countries. Vasquez et al use models to predict the impact of increasing temperatures and heatwaves on the replacement of wild mosquito populations with wMel carriers that are poor dengue vectors. They claim that wMel replacement is resilient to pre-2060 climate change including [...]
Comparative approaches in social network ecology
Published: 2023-09-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Social systems vary enormously across the animal kingdom, with important implications for ecological and evolutionary processes such as infectious disease dynamics, anti-predator defense, and the evolution of cooperation. Comparing social network structures between species offers a promising route to help disentangle the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape this diversity. Comparative [...]
Re-defining common mycorrhizal and fungal networks
Published: 2023-09-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
The current use of the term ‘common mycorrhizal network’ (CMN) stipulates a direct link between plants formed by the mycelium of a mycorrhizal fungus. This means that a specific case (involving hyphal continuity) is used to define a much broader phenomenon of hyphae interlinking among plant roots. We here offer a more inclusive definition of the common mycorrhizal network as a network formed by a [...]
Diversity and function of fluorescent molecules in marine animals
Published: 2023-09-05
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Fluorescence in marine animals has mainly been studied in Cnidaria but is found in many different phyla such as Annelida, Crustacea, Mollusca, and Chordata. While many fluorescent proteins and molecules have been identified, very little information is available about the biological function of fluorescence. In this review, we focus on describing the occurrence of fluorescence in marine animals [...]
Partitioning the phenotypic variance of reaction norms
Published: 2023-09-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Many phenotypic traits vary in a predictable way across environments, as captured by their norms of reaction. These reaction norms may be discrete or continuous, and can substantially vary in shape across organisms and traits, making it difficult to compare amounts and types of plasticity among (and sometimes even within) studies. In addition, the evolutionary potential of phenotypic traits in [...]