Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
On the Origin of Nightjars (Caprimulgidae): Perspectives from the Fossil Record
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology
Fossils represent the only direct evidence for the ancestral morphologies, antiquity, and historical geographic distributions of life on Earth. The fossil record of the avian clade Strisores (which includes nightjars, oilbirds, potoos, frogmouths, owlet-nightjars, treeswifts, swifts, and hummingbirds) has been richly documented by avian standards, with well-corroborated stem-group representatives [...]
The radiation and geographic expansion of primates through diverse climates
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
One of the most influential hypotheses about primate evolution postulates that their origin, radiation, and major dispersals were associated with exceptionally warm conditions in tropical forests at northern latitudes (henceforth the warm tropical forest hypothesis). However, this notion has proven difficult to test given the overall uncertainty about both geographic locations and paleoclimates [...]
A Practical Guide to Quantifying Ecological Coexistence
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Coexistence is simultaneously one of the most fundamental concepts of ecology, and one of the most difficult to define and quantify. A particular challenge is that, despite a well-developed body of research on the subject, several different schools of thought have developed over the past century, leading to multiple independent, and largely isolated, branches of literature with distinct [...]
Urban refugia enhance persistence of an endangered endemic keystone lizard threatened by the rapid spread of an invasive predator
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Urbanization shapes global patterns of biodiversity. While often driving biodiversity loss and biotic homogenization, urban areas could paradoxically act as refugia for species threatened by other global change drivers, such as biological invasions. Despite growing interest in their conservation potential, a lack of robust empirical studies unveiling how urban refugia emerge and contribute to [...]
Masting ontogeny: the largest masting benefits accrue to the largest trees
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Background and Aims. Both plants and animals display considerable variation in their phenotypic traits as they grow. This variation helps organisms to adapt to specific challenges at different stages of development. Masting, the variable and synchronized seed production across years by a population of plants, is a common reproductive strategy in perennial plants that can enhance reproductive [...]
The greatest extinction event in 66 million years?
Published: 2024-09-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Biological communities are changing rapidly in response to human activities, with the high rate of vertebrate species extinction leading many to propose that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event. Five past mass extinction events have most commonly been emphasised across the Phanerozoic, with the last occurring at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. Life on Earth has, [...]
Life history shapes variation in egg composition in the blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus
Published: 2024-09-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Maternal investment directly shapes early developmental conditions and therefore has long-term fitness consequences for the offspring. In oviparous species prenatal maternal investment is fixed at the time of laying. To ensure the best survival chances for most of their offspring, females must equip their eggs with the resources required to perform well under various circumstances, yet the actual [...]
Adaptive sampling for ecological monitoring using biased data: A stratum-based approach
Published: 2024-09-10
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Indicators of biodiversity change across large extents of geographic, temporal and taxonomic space are frequent products of various types of ecological monitoring and other data collection efforts. Unfortunately, many such indicators are based on data that are highly unlikely to be representative of the intended statistical populations. Where there is full control over sampling processes, [...]
Harnessing social media data to track species range shifts
Published: 2024-09-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Biodiversity monitoring programs and citizen science data remain heavily biased towards the Global North. Incorporating social media data can complement existing gaps, especially in megadiverse countries with limited records, but whether such data can significantly improve our understanding of range-shifting species is unknown. Here, we collated locality data from Flickr and Facebook, in addition [...]
The evolution of sex ratio strategies in cooperative breeders
Published: 2024-09-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. The offspring sex ratio is often biased in cooperative breeders. Two hypotheses explain why this could be adaptive: 1) the local resource enhancement hypothesis, and 2) the local resource competition hypothesis. The first poses that offspring of the helping sex should be overproduced, as helpers provide fitness benefits to parents and future siblings. The second poses that offspring of the [...]
Climate change is associated with a higher extinction risk of a subshrub in anthropogenic landscapes
Published: 2024-09-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
In most ecosystems, the increasingly strong effects of climate change on biodiversity co-occur with other anthropogenic pressures, most importantly land-use change. However, many long-term demographic studies focus on populations monitored in protected areas, and our understanding of how climate change will affect population persistence under anthropogenic land use is still limited. To fill this [...]
Molecular plasticity contributes to thermal resilience in two coastal fish species
Published: 2024-09-03
Subjects: Life Sciences, Zoology
Understanding species capacities to adjust to shifting thermal environments is crucial amidst current climate-mediated ocean warming. Fish populations displaying high thermal plasticity can undergo molecular, metabolic, and mitochondrial modifications in response to heat stress. Under the context of heat stress, such acclimation provides a means to maintain normal biological functions through [...]
Evidence of the Impacts of Pharmaceuticals on Aquatic Animal Behaviour (EIPAAB): a systematic map and open access database
Published: 2024-09-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
BackgroundOver the last decade, pharmaceutical pollution in aquatic ecosystems has emerged as a pressing environmental issue. Recent years have also seen a surge in scientific interest in the use of behavioural endpoints in chemical risk assessment and regulatory activities, underscoring their importance for fitness and survival. In this respect, data on how pharmaceuticals alter the behaviour of [...]
Genetic adaptation to climate change in wild populations: a systematic literature review identifies opportunities to strengthen our evidence base
Published: 2024-09-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
To understand to what extent evolution can contribute to bending the curve of ongoing biodiversity losses, we urgently need to characterize the adaptive potential of populations. This systematic literature review comprehensively gathers existing examples of genetic adaptation to climate change to (1) guide efforts to assess genetic adaptation to climate change in a wider variety of species and [...]
The role of forests in global climate adaptation
Published: 2024-09-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Forests play a crucial role in regulating the global climate. Yet, forests also influence the local climate conditions through biophysical processes that directly impact human wellbeing. With growing policy emphasis on these climate adaptation effects, we review the scale dependent impacts of forests on climate conditions and their implications for human wellbeing. Generally, existing forests [...]