Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Multi-population analysis reveals spatial consistency in drivers of population dynamics of a declining migratory bird
Published: 2022-04-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Population Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Survival Analysis, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Many migratory species are in decline across their geographical ranges. Single-population studies can provide important insights into drivers at a local scale, but effective conservation requires multi-population perspectives. This is challenging because relevant data are often hard to consolidate, and state-of-the-art analytical tools are typically tailored to specific datasets. We capitalized [...]
Temporary behavioral responses to playbacks by a pest parrot and implications for management
Published: 2022-04-22
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Human-wildlife interactions continue to increase due to anthropogenic disturbances, with some interactions resulting in conflict. Leveraging a taxa’s bias for a particular sensory cue is a promising management avenue for reducing the potential and realized negative consequences of human-wildlife conflict. For instance, many avian species heavily depend on acoustic communication, and acoustic cues [...]
Simple methods for improving the communication of uncertainty in species’ temporal trends
Published: 2022-04-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Temporal trends in species occupancy or abundance are a fundamental source of information for ecology and conservation. Model-based uncertainty in these trends is often communicated as frequentist confidence or Bayesian credible intervals; however, these are often misinterpreted in various ways, even by scientists. Research from the science of information visualisation indicates that line [...]
Plant families exhibit unique geographic trends in C4 richness and cover
Published: 2022-04-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Numerous studies have analysed the relationship between C4 plant cover and climate. However, few have examined how different C4 taxa vary in their response to climate, or how environmental factors alter C4:C3 abundance. Here we investigate (a) how proportional C4 plant cover and richness (relative to C3) responds to changes in climate and local environmental factors, and (b) if this response is [...]
Towards a cohesive understanding of ecological complexity
Published: 2022-04-15
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Systems Biology
Understanding phenomena typical of complex systems is key for progress in ecology and conservation amidst escalating global environmental change. However, myriad definitions of complexity hamper conceptual advancements and synthesis. Ecological complexity may be better understood by following the strong theoretical basis of complexity science. We conduct bibliometric and text-mining analyses to [...]
Lessons learned from organizing and teaching virtual phylogenetics workshops
Published: 2022-04-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
In 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic led to an abrupt overhaul of many academic practices, including the transition of scientific events, such as workshops, to a fully virtual format. We describe our experiences organizing and teaching online-only statistical phylogenetics workshops and the lessons we learned along the way. We found that online workshops present some specific challenges, but [...]
What Determines the Minimum Body Size for Vertebrates?
Published: 2022-04-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The minimum body size of vertebrate species lies just above 6 millimeters, in stark contrast to the minimum sizes attained by species of other major taxonomic groups. This paper presents two connected hypotheses explaining this minimum size obtainable with a vertebrate Bauplan. Firstly, the complex bodies of vertebrates might not be amendable to reduction below a certain level of complexity. We [...]
Handling Character Dependency in Phylogenetic Inference: Extensive Performance Testing of Assumptions and Solutions Using Simulated Data
Published: 2022-04-08
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Character dependency is a major conceptual and methodological problem in phylogenetic inference of morphological datasets, as it violates the assumption of characters independency that is common to all phylogenetic methods. It is more frequently observed in higher-level phylogenies or in datasets characterizing major evolutionary transitions, as these represent parts of the tree of life where [...]
Are we underestimating the ecological and evolutionary effects of warming? Interactions with other environmental drivers may increase species vulnerability to high temperatures
Published: 2022-04-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Warming, the most prominent aspect of global environmental change, already affects most ecosystems on Earth. In recent years, biologists have increasingly integrated the effects of warming into their models by capturing how temperature shapes their physiology, ecology, behavior, evolutionary adaptation, and probability of extirpation/extinction. The more physiologically-grounded approaches to [...]
The evolution of conspicuousness in frogs: when to signal toxicity?
Published: 2022-04-06
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Many organisms use conspicuous color patterns to advertise their toxicity or unpalatability, a strategy known as aposematism. Despite the recognized benefits of this anti-predator tactic, not all chemically defended species exhibit warning coloration. Here, we use a comparative approach to investigate which factors predict the evolution of conspicuousness in frogs, a group in which conspicuous [...]
Surprising Abundant Mussel Beds in the Center of Boston Harbor in the Midst of a Regional Die-Back
Published: 2022-04-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Mussel beds in the rocky intertidal of New England have long been a paradigmatic example of how physical forces – wave action – reduces predator abundance and enables a distinct ecological community. These beds, however, have witnessed a precipitous >60% decline since the 1970s for currently unknown reasons. Here we report on the surprising persistence of large dense mussel beds in the middle [...]
Reducing the biases in false correlations between discrete characters
Published: 2022-04-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The correlation between two characters is often interpreted as evidence that there exists a significant and biologically important relationship between them. However, Maddison and FitzJohn (2015) recently pointed out that in certain situations find evidence of correlated evolution between two categorical characters is often spurious, particularly, when the dependent relationship stems from a [...]
A human-neutral large carnivore? No patterns in the body mass of gray wolves (Canis lupus) across a gradient of anthropization
Published: 2022-04-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
English - The gray wolf (Canis lupus) expanded its distribution in Europe over the last few decades. To better understand the extent to which wolves could re-occupy their historical range, nowadays including anthropized landscapes, it is important to test if and how anthropization can affect fitness-related traits in this species. We modeled how anthropization was associated with the body [...]
Extreme heatwave drives topography-dependent patterns of mortality in a bed-forming intertidal barnacle, with implications for associated community structure
Published: 2022-04-02
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Heatwave frequency and intensity will increase as climate change progresses. Intertidal sessile invertebrates, which often form thermally benign microhabitats for associated species, are vulnerable to thermal stress because they have minimal ability to behaviourally thermoregulate. Understanding what factors influence the mortality of biogenic species and how heatwaves might impact their ability [...]
The easyclimate R package: easy access to high-resolution daily climate data for Europe
Published: 2022-03-30
Subjects: Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
In recent decades there has been an increasing demand by ecologists for harmonized climatic data at large spatial scales and spanning long periods. Here we present easyclimate, a software package to obtain daily climatic data at high resolution (0.0083º, ~1 km) with R. The package facilitates the downloading and processing of precipitation, minimum and maximum temperatures for Europe from 1950 to [...]