Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Like little lagoons: the contribution of valli da pesca to the Ecosystem Services supply of the Venice Lagoon
Published: 2022-12-23
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The Venice lagoon social-ecological system is characterized by a strong relationship between the natural environment and human activities. This is especially noticeable in the aquaculture and hunting reserves of the lagoon, locally known as valli da pesca. Previous works about Ecosystem Services (ESs) in the Venice lagoon focused on the so-called “open lagoon”, overlooking the role of the valli [...]
Use of Airborne Laser Scanning to assess effects of understorey vegetation structure on nest-site selection and breeding performance in an Australian passerine bird
Published: 2022-12-18
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology
In wild bird populations, the structure of vegetation around nest-sites can influence the risk of predation of dependent offspring, generating selection for nest-sites with vegetation characteristics associated with lower predation rates. However, vegetation structure can be difficult to quantify objectively in the field, which might explain why there remains a general lack of understanding of [...]
How do monomorphic bacteria evolve? The Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex and the awkward population genetics of extreme clonality
Published: 2022-12-15
Subjects: Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Pathogenic Microbiology, Population Biology
Exchange of genetic material through sexual reproduction or horizontal gene transfer is ubiquitous in nature. Among the few outliers that rarely recombine and mainly evolve by de novo mutation are a group of deadly bacterial pathogens, including the causative agents of leprosy, plague, typhoid, and tuberculosis. The interplay of evolutionary processes is poorly understood in these organisms. [...]
Evaluating top-down, bottom-up, and environmental drivers of pelagic food web dynamics along an estuarine gradient
Published: 2022-12-15
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Identification of the key biotic and abiotic drivers within food webs is important for understanding species abundance changes in ecosystems, particularly across ecotones where there may be strong variation in interaction strengths. Using structural equation models and four decades of integrated data from the San Francisco Estuary, we investigated the relative effects of top-down, bottom-up, and [...]
An Annotated Checklist of Lichens of the Opal Creek Wilderness and Adjacent Areas: a Pre-Fire Baseline
Published: 2022-12-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
In 2020 the Beachie Creek Fire burned a large area of forest in the northern Oregon Cascade Range including public and private land and much of the Opal Creek Wilderness. We compiled a baseline data set from various sources of the lichens known to occur before the fire within this area. These data are presented as an annotated species checklist documenting two hundred and eighty species. Euopsis [...]
Habitat destruction threatens jaguars in a mixed land use region of eastern Bolivia
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Large carnivores such as the jaguar (Panthera onca) are particularly susceptible to population decline and local extinction as a result of habitat loss. Here, we report on the long-term monitoring of a local jaguar population in a mixed land use area in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia from March 2017 to December 2019. We recorded 15 jaguar individuals and four reproduction events (five offspring [...]
Exploratory personality is independent of telomere dynamics in a wild bird population
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Numerous studies have demonstrated that individuals within a species will consistently vary between one another in behavioural traits. A prominent adaptive explanation for such ‘animal personalities’ relates to an individual’s intrinsic state driving and/or being driven by behaviour. Telomeres – the protective caps at the end of chromosomes which exist in most organisms – have been proposed as a [...]
Advances in the reconstruction of the Spider Tree of Life: a roadmap for spider systematics and comparative studies
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
In the last decade and a half, advances in genetic sequencing technologies have revolutionized systematics, transforming the field as studying morphological characters; a few genetic markers have given way to genomic data sets in the phylogenomic era. A plethora of molecular phylogenetic studies on many taxonomic groups have come about, converging on, or refuting prevailing morphology or [...]
A framework for improving the reproducibility of data extraction for meta-analysis
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Psychology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Extracting data from studies is the norm in meta-analyses, enabling researchers to generate effect sizes when raw data are otherwise not available. While there has been a general push for increased reproducibility in meta-analysis, the transparency and reproducibility of the data extraction phase is still lagging behind. Unfortunately, there is little guidance of how to make this process more [...]
Zooplankton as a model to study the effects of anthropogenic sounds on aquatic ecosystems
Published: 2022-12-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
There is a growing interest in the impact of acoustic pollution on aquatic ecosystems. Currently, research has primarily focused on hearing species, particularly fishes and mammals. However, species from lower trophic levels, including many invertebrates, are less studied despite their ecological significance. Among these taxa, studies examining the effects of sound on holozooplankton are [...]
Co-crediting system for carbon and biodiversity
Published: 2022-12-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Carbon crediting and land offsets for biodiversity protection are implemented to tackle the challenges of increasing greenhouse gas emissions and loss of global biodiversity, but these two mechanisms are not optimal when considered separately. Focusing solely on carbon capture – the primary goal of most carbon-focused offsetting commitments – often results in the establishment of non-native, [...]
Offspring sex ratio increases with male reproductive success in the polygynous southern elephant seals
Published: 2022-12-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
In polygynous species, most dominant males sire a disproportionate number of offspring and dominance rank is assumed to be age dependent. Yet, extreme inter-male competition and high early male mortality prevent most males from reaching a social status that could guaranty a high reproductive success. Alternative reproductive tactics may have evolved to maximize male reproductive success despite a [...]
Imagining Kant’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge: Philosophy and Education in Microbiology
Published: 2022-12-10
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
In the field of observational and experimental natural sciences (as is the case for microbiology), recent decades have been overinfluenced by overwhelming technological advances, and the space of abstraction has been frequently disdained. However, the predictable future of biological sciences should necessarily recover the synthetic dimension of “natural philosophy”. We should understand the [...]
Comprehensive biodiversity survey of Wategora Reserve and Everley Park along Duck River, western Sydney
Published: 2022-12-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Although much of suburban Sydney is heavily urbanised, there are also many pockets of remnant vegetation scattered throughout the region, even in the most built-up areas. From 2020-2022 I conducted a comprehensive biodiversity survey of Wategora Reserve, and the riparian vegetation adjacent to Everley Park directly south of the reserve, a small fragment of remnant bushland on the western bank of [...]
Power and limitations of the mutations-area relationship to assess within-species genetic diversity targets for post-2020 Sustainable Development Goals
Published: 2022-12-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
To evaluate the United Nation’s preliminary post-2020 sustainable goals on protecting high levels of genetic diversity per species, Exposito-Alonso et al. (2022) proposed a new framework to predict a species’ loss of genetic diversity given its loss of habitat area. This method, called the mutations-area relationship (MAR), is analogous to the species-area relationship (SAR), often used to assess [...]