Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Publication bias impacts on effect size, statistical power, and magnitude (Type M) and sign (Type S) errors in ecology and evolutionary biology
Published: 2022-09-12
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability
Collaborative assessments of direct replicability of empirical studies in the medical and social sciences have exposed alarmingly low rates of replicability, a phenomenon dubbed the ‘replication crisis’. Poor replicability has spurred cultural changes targeted at improving reliability in these disciplines. Given the absence of equivalent replication projects in ecology and evolutionary biology, [...]
Demystifying the graduate school application process
Published: 2022-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Navigating the graduate school application process is often challenging, requiring intricate knowledge of academia and graduate institutional structures. This “Hidden Curriculum of Academia” includes what different graduate degrees offer, how to connect with a faculty member of interest, and the skills needed to submit a “competitive” application. We hope to demystify a portion of this hidden [...]
Realising the potential of real-time online monitoring for conservation culturomics
Published: 2022-09-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Environmental monitoring is increasingly shifting towards a set of systems that describe changes in real-time. In ecology specifically, a series of challenges have prevented the roll-out of real-time monitoring for features such as biodiversity change or ecosystem service provision. Conservation culturomics, a field concerned with interactions between people and nature, is well-placed to [...]
Metamicrobiome-driven homeostasis of nutrient recycling
Published: 2022-09-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Carbon and nutrient recycling by free-living microbial decomposers and fire - two key recycling pathways - are highly sensitive to climatic variation. However, mutualistic associations of microbiomes with plants and animals cause previously underestimated environmental buffering effects. This close cooperation between small and large organisms solves a fundamental allometric trade-off between [...]
SpatialBoundaries.jl: Edge detection using spatial wombling
Published: 2022-09-07
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences
Spatial wombling is an approach for detecting edges within a defined two-dimensional landscape. This is achieved by calculating the rate and direction of change through the interpolation of points. This not only gives an approximation as to the shape of the landscape but can also be used to identify candidate boundaries cells that delimit a shift from one state to another within the landscape. [...]
Does symmetry preclude the evolution of senescence? A comment on Pen & Flatt 2021
Published: 2022-09-07
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences
Patterns of senescence across the tree of life remain poorly understood and a clearly important task is to identify the minimal conditions for senescence to occur at all. Starting with Weismann in 1882, it has generally been argued that some type of asymmetry between parent and offspring is a prerequisite for old individuals to show declining performance. The intuitive role of asymmetries should, [...]
Heterostyly on Japanese Islands
Published: 2022-09-07
Subjects: Botany, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Heterostyly is a genetically controlled floral polymorphism that promote outbreeding. Although many studies on heterostyly have been done in Japan, there have been no comprehensive analysis nor review. Here I present the list of heterostyly in the native flora of Japan through reviewing references. By using this list, I tested the difference in occurrence of heterostylous species among subgroups [...]
The role of hybrid seed inviability in angiosperm speciation
Published: 2022-09-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Understanding which reproductive barriers contribute to speciation is essential to understanding the diversity of life on earth. Several contemporary examples of strong hybrid seed inviability (HSI) between recently diverged species suggest that HSI may play a fundamental role in plant speciation. Yet, a broader synthesis of HSI is needed to clarify its role in diversification. Here, I review the [...]
Beyond Kuhnian Paradigms: Normal Science and Theory Dependence in Ecology
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn has influenced scientists for decades. It focuses on a progression of science involving periodic, fundamental shifts—revolutions—from one existing paradigm to another. Embedded in this theory is the concept of normal science, i.e., scientists focus on intricacies within the context of established theory, without challenging the underlying [...]
Maintenance and expansion of genetic and trait variation following domestication in a clonal crop
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Agriculture, Bioinformatics, Biosecurity, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Clonal propagation enables favourable crop genotypes to be rapidly selected and multiplied. However, the absence of sexual propagation can lead to low genetic diversity and accumulation of deleterious mutations, which may eventually render crops less resilient to pathogens or environmental change. To better understand this trade-off, we characterise the domestication and contemporary genetic [...]
Unraveling the environment-phenotype-genotype nexus: examples, lessons and prospects from bird plumage colors
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Connecting adaptive phenotypic variation to both its genetic and ecological bases is one of the central goals of evolutionary biology. Birds, due to their ease of study and solid base of existing knowledge, present an ideal clade in which to advance that goal. Bird color traits in particular have a long tradition of being at the forefront of conceptual advances in evolutionary biology. Combined [...]
Randomization analyses in niche and distribution modeling
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In the field of niche modeling, data are often subject to multiple interacting sources of uncertainty, bias, and autocorrelation that make them difficult to analyze using traditional statistical approaches. Randomization is often used in statistical tests in order to estimate distributions that are difficult to specify analytically. Decades of development in the niche modeling literature have [...]
Decoupled responses of biodiversity facets driven from anuran vulnerability to climate and land use changes
Published: 2022-08-30
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Anthropogenic climate and land use changes are the main drivers of biodiversity loss, promoting a major reorganization of the biota in all ecosystems. Biodiversity loss implies not only in the loss of species, but also entails losses in other dimensions of biodiversity, such as functional diversity, phylogenetic diversity and the diversity of ecological interactions.Yet, each of those facets of [...]
Sampling strategy matters to accurately estimate response curves’ parameters in species distribution models
Published: 2022-08-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Aim: Assessing how different sampling strategies affect the accuracy and precision of species response curves estimated by parametric Species Distribution Models. Major taxa studied: Virtual plant species. Location: Abruzzo (Italy). Time period: Timeless (simulated data). Methods: We simulated the occurrence of two virtual species with different ecology (generalist vs specialist) and [...]
Bird Eye Color: A Rainbow of Variation, a Spectrum of Explanations
Published: 2022-08-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Birds display a rainbow of eye colors, but this trait has received relatively little study compared to plumage coloration. Avian eye color variation occurs at all phylogenetic scales: it can be conserved throughout whole families or vary within a single species, yet the evolutionary importance of eye color variation within species and across the avian phylogeny is also understudied. Here, we [...]