Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Published: 2022-11-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
The current effects of global warming on marine ecosystems are predicted to increase, with species responding by changing their spatial distributions. Marine ectotherms such as fish experience elevated distribution shifts, as temperature plays a key role in physiological functions and delineating population ranges through thermal constraints. Distributional response predictions necessary for [...]
Published: 2022-11-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences
While it is now widely accepted that microorganisms provide essential functions in restoration ecology, the nature of relationships between microbial community assembly and ecosystem recovery remain unclear. There has been a longstanding challenge to decipher whether microorganisms facilitate or simply follow ecosystem recovery, and evidence for each is mixed at best. We propose that [...]
Published: 2022-11-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ecological forecasting is critical in understanding of ecological responses to climate change and is increasingly used in climate mitigation plans. The forecasts from correlative models can be challenged by novel environmental conditions and predictor collinearity that are common during model extrapolation. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive knowledge about how these factors [...]
Published: 2022-11-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Although several studies have focused on the influence of moonlight over deer-vehicle collisions, findings have been inconsistent. This may be due to neglecting the effects of cloud cover, a major impediment to moon illumination, and circannual variation in both deer and human activity. We modeled how median cloud cover interacted with the illuminated fraction of the moon in affecting daily roe [...]
Published: 2022-11-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Charles Darwin proposed the theory of evolution that natural selection leads to the evolution of organisms in "On the Origin of Species”, but did not show the mechanism by which new species differentiate and fix. Speciation requires a system in which genes are not mixed by interspecific hybridization, and reproductive isolation, especially postmating reproductive isolation, is considered to be [...]
Published: 2022-11-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
We use genomic information to tell us stories of evolutionary origins. But what does it mean when different genomes report wildly different accounts of lineage history? This “discordance” can be a consequence of a fascinating suite of natural history and evolutionary phenomena, from the different inheritance mechanisms of nuclear vs. cytoplasmic genomes to hybridization and introgression to [...]
Published: 2022-11-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
The true blueberries (Vaccinium sect. Cyanococcus; Ericaceae) comprise a clade of about nine to 24 species distributed mainly in eastern temperate North America, with one species reaching farther west. Despite extensive study, the systematics and evolution of the group are still poorly understood. Limited morphological variation, multiple ploidy levels of uncertain origin, and natural [...]
Published: 2022-11-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Wild animals have parasites. This inconvenient truth has far-reaching implications for biologists measuring animal performance traits: infection with parasites can alter host behaviour and physiology in profound and sometimes counterintuitive ways. Yet, to what extent do studies on wild animals take individual infection status into account? 2. We performed a systematic review across eight [...]
Published: 2022-11-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Lake and stream fauna are frequently studied, yet surprisingly little is known about ecological and evolutionary dynamics of species that inhabit both lentic and lotic habitats. There are few examples of species co-occurring in the different habitat flow types, which raises questions on how this may impact their ability to adapt to changing climatic conditions. The aquatic insect Limnephilus [...]
Published: 2022-11-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Across amniotes, squamates represent the only clade with highly variable parity modes, oviparity (egg-laying) and viviparity (live-birth). Despite this, relatively little is known about how oviparity and viviparity evolve at the genomic and physiological levels in squamates. Within the context of interdisciplinary medical, poultry science, and reproductive biology literature, I review the [...]
Published: 2022-11-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The idea that adaptive change is subject to biases in variation by a "first come, first served" dynamic is not part of classic evolutionary reasoning. Yet, predictable effects of biases in the introduction of variation have been reported in models of population genetics, in laboratory evolution, and in retrospective analyses of natural adaptation. This effect of "arrival bias" has potentially [...]
Published: 2022-11-17
Subjects: Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Photosynthesis has shaped the body plan, physiology, as well as gene repertoire of all plants. Shifts to a parasitic lifestyle evolved at least twelve times, leading to more than four thousand extant parasitic plant species. This transition has consistently left a major evolutionary footprint among these parasites. Otherwise rare features have evolved repetitively at the molecular level and [...]
Published: 2022-11-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Cliffs are unique ecosystems with an outstanding but relatively unknown plant diversity, harboring rare, endemic and threatened species, but also common and dominant species. The rising popularity of climbing represents an increasing threat to cliff biota, potentially diminishing diversity and species associations, and affecting the community composition. We used a novel closely paired sampling [...]
Published: 2022-11-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
The global target to protect 30% of Earth’s land and ocean by 2030 has prompted governments to report their progress in biodiversity conservation. Announcements of countries reaching 30 % of conservation area are widely commended by the international community, despite signs of increasing pressures within protected areas, poor representativity of key threatened ecosystems, and a lack of [...]
Published: 2022-11-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Biogeographic disjunction patterns, where multiple taxonomic groups are shared between isolated geographic areas, represent excellent systems for investigating the historical assembly of modern biotas as well as fundamental biological processes such as speciation, diversification, niche evolution, and evolutionary responses to climate change. Studies on plant genera disjunct across the Northern [...]