Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Published: 2023-06-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Policy, Genetics, Life Sciences
Measuring genetic diversity of wild species using DNA-based data remains resource intensive and time-consuming for nearly all species. Yet, genetic assessments are needed for global conservation commitments including the Convention on Biological Diversity and for governments and managers to evaluate conservation progress and to prioritize species and populations to preserve and recover genetic [...]
Published: 2023-06-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Dispersal plays a key role in shaping spatial patterns of biodiversity, yet its spatial heterogeneity is often overlooked in biodiversity analyses and management strategies. Properly parametrized heterogeneous dispersal networks capture the complex interplay between landscape structure and species-specific dispersal capacities. This heterogeneity, however, is recurrently neglected when studying [...]
Published: 2023-06-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change impacts ecosystems directly through differences in species specific responses as well as indirectly through changes to the strength of species interactions. To predict how species will be impacted by ongoing environmental change, we need to better understand the relative roles of these direct and indirect effects. Salinity is a strong driver of ecological patterns and processes, [...]
Published: 2023-06-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Insects play important roles in food chains, but quantifying how insect abundance affects population dynamics in natural communities is challenging. National scale monitoring data provides opportunities to identify trophic relationships at broad spatial and temporal scales but requires careful approaches to link data from different schemes. Here, using two monitoring datasets from Great Britain, [...]
Published: 2023-06-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
As nations design a framework and a process for implementing the new goals and targets set by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the question on how to report on the successes and failures of policy implementation is becoming more salient. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential role of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), Essential Ecosystem Services Variables (EESV) and their [...]
Published: 2023-06-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Published: 2023-06-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
In some areas burned by recent wildfires, most or all giant sequoias were killed. Sequoia managers wish to know whether post-fire seedling establishment in those areas has been adequate to regenerate the locally extirpated sequoias. To provide a yardstick for interpreting sequoia seedling densities measured after the recent severe wildfires, here we calculate mean seedling densities measured [...]
Published: 2023-05-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Vegetation structural complexity and the diversity of animal communities are closely linked in vegetated ecosystems. These structure-diversity relationships have the potential to be used to predict biodiversity at large spatial scales using remote sensing data. However, structure-diversity relationships may not be generalizable across different ecosystems or even across ecotypes within a single [...]
Published: 2023-05-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Behavioral Neurobiology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Uncontroversial evidence of vocal production learning, the capacity to modify vocal output on the basis of experience, is sparsely distributed in the animal kingdom. We suggest that this is in large part due to a trade-off between vocal learning complexity and a much more widely distributed trait—non-vocal dexterity. We argue that given some generally required neural and anatomical conditions for [...]
Published: 2023-05-30
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Animal carcass decomposition is an often-overlooked component of nutrient cycles. The importance of carcass decomposition for increasing nutrient availability has been demonstrated in several ecosystems, but impacts in arid lands are poorly understood. In a protected high desert landscape in Argentina, puma predation of vicuñas is a main driver of carcass distribution. Here, we sampled puma kill [...]
Published: 2023-05-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
There is a cross-sectoral push amongst conservation practitioners to simultaneously mitigate biodiversity loss and climate change, especially as the latter increasingly threatens the former. Growing evidence demonstrates that animals can have substantial impacts on carbon cycling and as such, there are increasing calls to use animal conservation and trophic rewilding to help dually overcome [...]
Published: 2023-05-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology
Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that infect and replicate within bacterial hosts, playing a significant role in regulating microbial populations and ecosystem dynamics. However, phages from extreme environments such as polar regions remain relatively understudied due to challenges like restricted ecosystem access and low biomass. Understanding the diversity, structure, and functions of [...]
Published: 2023-05-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fire is a critical driver of giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum [Lindl.] Buchholz) regeneration. However, fire suppression combined with the effects of increased temperature and severe drought have resulted in fires of an intensity and size outside of the historical norm. As a result, recent mega-fires have killed a significant portion of the world’s sequoia population (13 to 19%), and [...]
Published: 2023-05-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. In the Anthropocene, the general public is a key part of biodiversity conservation since several aspects of their daily life are inevitably linked to major threats to biodiversity. It is thus important to improve their conservation awareness. While a growing body of research has demonstrated the potential of English-language nature documentaries to raise public conservation awareness, [...]
Published: 2023-05-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
When a plant is introduced to a new ecosystem it may escape from some of its coevolved herbivores. Reduced herbivore damage, and the ability of introduced plants to allocate resources from defence to growth and reproduction can increase the success of introduced species. This mechanism is known as enemy release and is known to occur in some species and situations, but not in others. Understanding [...]