Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Animating the carbon cycle through trophic rewilding could provide highly effective natural climate solutions
Published: 2022-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Natural climate solutions are being advanced as cost-effective and safe ways to achieve net-zero emissions by protecting and enhancing carbon capture and storage in plants, and in soils and sediments in terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Current thinking holds that these solutions have the added benefit of protecting habitats and landscapes to restore and conserve animal species diversity. [...]
Notes from the Past Show How Local Variability can Stymie Urchins and the Rise of the Reds in the Gulf of Maine
Published: 2022-05-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
The impacts of global change — from shifts in climate to overfishing to land use change — can depend heavily on local abiotic context. Building an understanding of how to downscale global change scenarios to local impacts is often difficult, however, and requires historical data across large gradients of variability. Such data are often not available — particularly in peer reviewed or gray [...]
Macroecological processes drive spiritual ecosystem services obtained from giant trees
Published: 2022-05-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology, Sociology of Religion
Giant trees that have come to have their own unique identities are often named by local people and can inspire a sense of awe and become objects of faith. Although these giant trees provide various kinds of spiritual ecosystem services that are beneficial to the spiritual well-being of the human society, the drivers of these services remain unclear. Using structural equation modeling with 38,994 [...]
Fine-scale spatial distribution of biodiversity citizen science in a natural area depends on area accessibility and differs from other recreational area use
Published: 2022-05-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Opportunistic citizen science produces large amounts of primary biodiversity data but is underutilized in the conservation and management of protected areas despite these areas’ status as citizen science hotspots. Application of these data may be limited by the challenge of understanding sampling patterns associated with opportunistic data at a scale relevant to local area management. An [...]
Synchrony in adult survival is remarkably strong among common temperate songbirds across France
Published: 2022-05-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Synchronous variation in demographic parameters across species destabilizes populations, metapopulations and metacommunities and increases extinction risks. Revealing the processes that synchronize population dynamics across species allows to identify trans-specific demographic processes that are subject to environmental forcing of overarching importance. Using a Bayesian, hierarchical [...]
Community-sourced sightings of atypical birds can be used to understand the evolution of plumage color and pattern
Published: 2022-05-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Birds are known for their brilliant colors and extraordinary patterns. Sightings of individuals with atypical plumage often cause considerable excitement in the birding public, but receive little attention beyond reporting one-off sightings by the scientific community. In this perspective, we argue that sightings of individuals with atypical plumage submitted to community science platforms hold [...]
Brain morphology correlates of learning and cognitive flexibility in a fish species (Poecilia reticulata)
Published: 2022-05-03
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Determining how variation in brain morphology affects cognitive abilities is important to understand inter-individual variation in cognition and, ultimately, cognitive evolution. Yet, despite many decades of research in this area, there is surprisingly little experimental data available from assays that quantify cognitive abilities and brain morphology in the same individuals. Here, we tested [...]
Litter decomposition is moderated by scale-dependent microenvironmental variation in tundra ecosystems
Published: 2022-05-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Tundra soils are one of the world’s largest organic carbon stores, yet this carbon is vulnerable to accelerated decomposition as climate warming progresses. We currently know very little about landscape-scale controls of litter decomposition in tundra ecosystems, which hinders our understanding of the global carbon cycle. 2. Here, we examined how local-scale topography, surface air [...]
Integrating presence-only and presence-absence data to model changes in species geographic ranges: An example of yaguarundí in Latin America
Published: 2022-04-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Anthropogenic changes such as land use and climate change affect species’ geographic ranges, causing range shifts, contractions, or expansions. However, data on range dynamics are insufficient, heterogeneous, and spatially and temporally biased in most regions. Integrated species distribution models (IDMs) offer a solution as they can complement good quality presence-absence data with [...]
High compositional dissimilarity among small communities is decoupled from environmental variation
Published: 2022-04-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Communities composed of small populations are predicted to be strongly influenced by stochastic demographic events and, thus, less affected by environmental selection than those composed of large populations. However, this prediction has only been tested with computer simulations, simplified controlled experiments, and limited observational data. Here, using multiple datasets on fish abundance in [...]
A vegetation carbon isoscape for Australia built by combining continental-scale field surveys with remote sensing
Published: 2022-04-26
Subjects: Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Context: Maps of C3 and C4 plant abundance and stable carbon isotope values (δ13C) across terrestrial landscapes are valuable tools in ecology to investigate species distribution and carbon exchange. Australia has a predominance of C4-plants, thus monitoring change in C3:C4 cover and δ13C is essential to national management priorities. Objectives: We applied a novel combination of field surveys [...]
Patterns of selection across gene regulatory networks
Published: 2022-04-26
Subjects: Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are the core engine of organismal development. If we would like to understand the origin and diversification of phenotypes, it is necessary to consider the structure of GRNs in order to reconstruct the links between genetic mutations and phenotypic change. Much of the progress in evolutionary developmental biology, however, has occurred without a nuanced [...]
Rates of ecological knowledge learning in Pemba, Tanzania: Implications for childhood evolution.
Published: 2022-04-24
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Humans live in diverse, complex niches where survival and reproduction are conditional on the acquisition of knowledge. Humans also have long childhoods, spending more than a decade before they become net producers. Whether the time needed to learn has been a selective force in the evolution of long human childhood is unclear, because there is little comparative data on the [...]
Neotropical Ornithology: Reckoning with historical assumptions, removing systemic barriers, and reimagining the future
Published: 2022-04-23
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Life Sciences, Ornithology
A major barrier to advancing ornithology is the systemic exclusion of professionals from the Global South. A recent special dossier, Advances in Neotropical Ornithology, and a shortfalls analysis therein, unintentionally followed a long-standing pattern of highlighting individuals, knowledge, and views from the Global North, while largely omitting the perspectives of people based within the [...]
Intra-individual variation in Galium odoratum is partly genetically based and is affected by experimental drought and shading
Published: 2022-04-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Background and aims: Climate-change induced warmer spring temperatures advance tree leaf-out and result in earlier shading of the forest floor. Climate change also leads to more frequent droughts. Forest understorey herbs may respond to these environmental changes by varying functional traits at different hierarchical levels of organisation. While trait variation at the intra-specific level is [...]