Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Mountain Gorillas benefit from social distancing too: Close proximity from tourists affects gorillas sociality
Published: 2022-02-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Gorilla tourism supports the protection of the gorilla ecosystem, benefiting humans and wildlife populations living therein. Assessing to what degree the presence and proximity of tourists affect wildlife aids long-term benefits. Because wild animals might see human activities as stressors, we hypothesised that the increased presence and proximity of tourists leads to an immediate increase in [...]
How has bird biodiversity changed over time? A review across spatio-temporal scales
Published: 2022-02-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Empirical quantification of biodiversity changes remains a challenge even in well surveyed groups such as birds. This may be because the change depends on spatio-temporal scales, specifically on spatial grain (i.e. area of a sampling unit), geographic extent (i.e. size of the area of interest), temporal grain (i.e. duration of a sampling event), and temporal extent (i.e. length of the time [...]
Survival of the luckiest
Published: 2022-02-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Opposite dynamics are behind natural selection and sexual selection. While the fittest survives in natural selection, the survivor will most likely be the luckiest when both dynamics are combined.
Achieving global biodiversity goals by 2050 requires urgent and integrated actions
Published: 2022-02-25
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Plant Sciences
Human impacts on the Earth’s biosphere are driving the global biodiversity crisis. Governments are preparing to agree on a set of actions intended to halt the loss of biodiversity and put it on a path to recovery by 2050. We provide evidence that the proposed actions can bend the curve for biodiversity, but only if these actions are implemented urgently and in an integrated manner.
Acute blood parasite infections induce moderate physiological costs in juvenile raptor hosts
Published: 2022-02-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Parasitology
Parasites trigger reactions in hosts, leading to suppressive resistance and/or tolerance, aiming to limit the parasitic costs. Both colonization by parasites and defense activation can induce varying amount of costs for the host. Understanding parasite-induced effects on host fitness crucially depends on assessing parasitic costs in specific wild host-parasite systems. To evaluate potential [...]
Soil biota impacts on plant access to different water pools in soil
Published: 2022-02-22
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Aims: Soil water availability depends on the capacity of soil pores to hold it via physical forces creating gradient of availability from tightly bound water to highly mobile water. Abiotic factors directly affect the size of these pools and plant access to them. Biotic factors influence plant-soil-water relations and possibly affect soil properties and plant access to different water pools. [...]
Systemic racism alters wildlife genetic diversity
Published: 2022-02-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Humans are the defining feature of urban ecosystems. In the United States, systemic racism has had lasting effects on the structure of cities, specifically due to government-mandated “redlining” policies that produced racially segregated neighborhoods that persist today. However, it is not known whether varying habitat structure and natural resource availability associated with racial segregation [...]
Drivers of community assembly change during succession in wood-decomposing insect communities
Published: 2022-02-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
1. The patterns of successional change of decomposer communities is unique in that resource availability predictably decreases as decomposition proceeds. Saproxylic (i.e., deadwood-dependent) beetles are a highly diverse and functionally important decomposer group, and their community composition is affected by both deadwood characteristics and other environmental factors. Understanding how [...]
Improving species conservation plans under IUCN’s One Plan Approach using quantitative genetic methods
Published: 2022-02-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Human activities are resulting in altered environmental conditions that are impacting the demography and evolution of species globally. If we wish to prevent anthropogenic extinction and extirpation, we need to improve our ability to restore wild populations. Ex situ populations can be an important tool for species conservation. However, it is difficult to prevent deviations from an optimal [...]
Graph embedding and transfer learning can help predict potential species interaction networks despite data limitations
Published: 2022-02-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Metawebs (networks of potential interactions within a species pool) are a powerful abstraction to understand how large-scale species interaction networks are structured. Because metawebs are typically expressed at large spatial and taxonomic scales, assembling them is a tedious and costly process; predictive methods can help circumvent the limitations in data deficiencies, by providing a first [...]
Past and future uses of text mining in ecology & evolution
Published: 2022-02-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Ecology and evolutionary biology, like other scientific fields, are experiencing an exponential growth of academic manuscripts. As domain knowledge accumulates, scientists will need new computational approaches for identifying relevant literature to read and include in formal literature reviews and meta-analyses. Importantly, these approaches can also facilitate automated, large-scale data [...]
Density dependence and disease dynamics: moving towards a predictive framework
Published: 2022-02-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
High population density is thought to exacerbate parasite exposure rates, leading to increased transmission and greater disease burdens. Different types of interactions exhibit different relationships with density, and therefore so do parasites that are spread by these interactions. Epidemiological models often assume a given density-transmission relationship, and the validity of this assumption [...]
Behavioural ecology at the spatial-social interface
Published: 2022-02-11
Subjects: Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Spatial and social behaviour are fundamental aspects of an animal’s biology, and the social and spatial environments are indelibly linked through mutual causes and shared consequences. Behavioural variation at the “spatial-social interface”, which we define as the intersection of social and spatial aspects of individuals’ phenotypes and environments, has implications for ecological and [...]
Integrated distribution modelling to estimate the national population size of an alpine bird
Published: 2022-02-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1) Estimates of species’ population abundances have important ramifications for conservation decision-making. Conservation practice, however, often has to rely on indices of relative abundance rather than absolute estimates. Attempts to estimate large-scale abundance estimates of species are limited by both the availability of data and statistical challenges. New opportunities are, however, [...]
Intergenerational effects of overfeeding on aversive learning in zebrafish (Danio rerio)
Published: 2022-02-07
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
The obesity epidemic is among the most serious and rapidly growing public health challenges of the 21st century. This rapid increase is concerning as obesity appears to negatively impact cognition and behaviour. Furthermore, some studies suggest that this negative effect could be carried across generations from both mothers and fathers although evidence is not consistent. Here, we attempt to [...]