Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Litter decomposition is moderated by scale-dependent microenvironmental variation in tundra ecosystems
Published: 2022-04-30
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: 2022-04-29
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: 2022-04-29
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: 2022-04-25
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: 2022-04-25
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: 2022-04-23
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: 2022-04-22
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: 2022-04-21
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 [...]
Multi-population analysis reveals spatial consistency in drivers of population dynamics of a declining migratory bird
Published: 2022-04-21
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: 2022-04-21
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: 2022-04-21
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: 2022-04-18
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: 2022-04-14
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: 2022-04-14
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: 2022-04-07
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 [...]