Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Post-fire reference densities for giant sequoia seedlings
Published: 2023-06-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
In some areas burned by recent wildfires, most or all giant sequoias were killed. Sequoia managers wish to know whether post-fire seedling establishment in those areas has been adequate to regenerate the locally extirpated sequoias. To provide a yardstick for interpreting sequoia seedling densities measured after the recent severe wildfires, here we calculate mean seedling densities measured [...]
Predicting Bird Diversity with Lidar-derived Vegetation Structure in an African Savanna
Published: 2023-05-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Vegetation structural complexity and the diversity of animal communities are closely linked in vegetated ecosystems. These structure-diversity relationships have the potential to be used to predict biodiversity at large spatial scales using remote sensing data. However, structure-diversity relationships may not be generalizable across different ecosystems or even across ecotypes within a single [...]
The trade-off between vocal learning and dexterity: a balancing act
Published: 2023-05-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Behavioral Neurobiology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Uncontroversial evidence of vocal production learning, the capacity to modify vocal output on the basis of experience, is sparsely distributed in the animal kingdom. We suggest that this is in large part due to a trade-off between vocal learning complexity and a much more widely distributed trait—non-vocal dexterity. We argue that given some generally required neural and anatomical conditions for [...]
Predation and biophysical context control long-term carcass nutrient inputs in an Andean ecosystem
Published: 2023-05-30
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Animal carcass decomposition is an often-overlooked component of nutrient cycles. The importance of carcass decomposition for increasing nutrient availability has been demonstrated in several ecosystems, but impacts in arid lands are poorly understood. In a protected high desert landscape in Argentina, puma predation of vicuñas is a main driver of carcass distribution. Here, we sampled puma kill [...]
Context matters when rewilding for climate change
Published: 2023-05-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
There is a cross-sectoral push amongst conservation practitioners to simultaneously mitigate biodiversity loss and climate change, especially as the latter increasingly threatens the former. Growing evidence demonstrates that animals can have substantial impacts on carbon cycling and as such, there are increasing calls to use animal conservation and trophic rewilding to help dually overcome [...]
Breaking the Ice: A Review of Phages in Polar Ecosystems
Published: 2023-05-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology
Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that infect and replicate within bacterial hosts, playing a significant role in regulating microbial populations and ecosystem dynamics. However, phages from extreme environments such as polar regions remain relatively understudied due to challenges like restricted ecosystem access and low biomass. Understanding the diversity, structure, and functions of [...]
Assessing giant sequoia mortality and regeneration following high severity wildfire
Published: 2023-05-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fire is a critical driver of giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum [Lindl.] Buchholz) regeneration. However, fire suppression combined with the effects of increased temperature and severe drought have resulted in fires of an intensity and size outside of the historical norm. As a result, recent mega-fires have killed a significant portion of the world’s sequoia population (13 to 19%), and [...]
Content analysis of nature documentaries in China: challenges and opportunities to raise public conservation awareness
Published: 2023-05-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. In the Anthropocene, the general public is a key part of biodiversity conservation since several aspects of their daily life are inevitably linked to major threats to biodiversity. It is thus important to improve their conservation awareness. While a growing body of research has demonstrated the potential of English-language nature documentaries to raise public conservation awareness, [...]
The great escape: patterns of enemy release are not explained by time, space, or climate
Published: 2023-05-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
When a plant is introduced to a new ecosystem it may escape from some of its coevolved herbivores. Reduced herbivore damage, and the ability of introduced plants to allocate resources from defence to growth and reproduction can increase the success of introduced species. This mechanism is known as enemy release and is known to occur in some species and situations, but not in others. Understanding [...]
The power and pitfalls of amino acid carbon stable isotopes for tracing origin and use of basal resources in food webs
Published: 2023-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Natural and anthropogenic stressors alter the composition, biomass, and nutritional quality of primary producers and microorganisms, the basal organisms that synthesise the biomolecules essential for metazoan growth and survival (i.e. basal resources). Traditional biomarkers have provided valuable insight into the spatiotemporal dynamics of basal resource use, but lack specificity in identifying [...]
Biodiversity promotes resistance but dominant species shape recovery of grasslands under extreme drought
Published: 2023-05-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Climate, Life Sciences
1. How biodiversity underpins ecosystem resistance (i.e., ability to withstand environmental perturbations) and recovery (i.e., ability to return to a pre-perturbation state) and thus stability under extreme climatic events is a timely question in ecology. To date, most studies have focused on the role of taxonomic diversity, neglecting how community functional composition and diversity beget [...]
Body condition and background noise alter female responses to uni- and multimodal signals emitted by a male mimicking robot frog
Published: 2023-05-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Mate choice in females is influenced by intrinsic and extrinsic factors, including signal conspicuity, receiver body condition, and environmental properties. These factors interact in complex ways to modulate the choice of mates. Multimodal signals are more conspicuous than their unimodal components and therefore should elicit a stronger response. However, variations in female body condition [...]
Implementing Code Review in the Scientific Workflow: Insights from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Published: 2023-05-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Code review increases reliability and improves reproducibility of research. As such, code review is an inevitable step in software development and is common in fields such as computer science. However, despite its importance, code review is noticeably lacking in ecology and evolutionary biology. This is problematic as it facilitates the propagation of coding errors and a reduction in [...]
Survival of the luckiest
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Opposite dynamics are behind natural selection and sexual selection. While the fittest survives in natural selection, the survivor will most likely be the luckiest when both dynamics are combined. As a result, chance has a greater impact on evolution.
iNaturalist is an open science resource for ecological genomics by enabling rapid and tractable records of initial observations of sequenced specimens
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
The rapidly growing body of publicly available sequencing data for rare species and/or wild-caught samples is accelerating the need for detailed records of the samples used to generate datasets. Many already published datasets are unlikely to ever be reused, not due to problems with the data themselves, but due to their questionable or unverifiable origins. In this paper, I present iNaturalist – [...]