Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Global Kelp Forest Restoration: Past lessons, status, and future goals
Published: 2021-05-17
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Kelp forest ecosystems and their associated ecosystem services are declining around the world. In response, marine managers are working to restore and counteract these declines. Kelp restoration first started in the 1700s in Japan and since then has spread across the globe. Restoration efforts, however, have been largely disconnected, with varying methodologies trialled by different actors in [...]
Using evolutionary functional-structural plant modelling to understand the effect of climate change on plant communities
Published: 2021-05-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
The “holy grail” of trait-based ecology is to predict the fitness of a species in a particular environment based on its functional traits, which has become all the more relevant in the light of global change. However, current ecological models are ill-equipped for this job: they rely on statistical methods and current observations rather than the mechanisms that determine how functional traits [...]
A practical guide to question formation, systematic searching and study screening for literature reviews in ecology and evolution
Published: 2021-05-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
1. Well-conducted systematic reviews are invaluable for synthesizing research findings. The conclusions of a review depend on how the research question was formulated, how relevant studies were found, and how studies were selected for synthesis. 2. Here, we present a practical guide for ecologists and evolutionary biologists on formulating a question for a systematic review, and finding a [...]
The ghost of hosts past: impacts of host extinction on parasite specificity
Published: 2021-05-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A growing body of research is focused on the extinction of parasite species in response to host endangerment and declines. Beyond the loss of parasite species richness, host extinction can impact apparent parasite host specificity, as measured by host richness or the phylogenetic distances among hosts. Such impacts on the distribution of parasites across the host phylogeny can have knock-on [...]
Evaluating ecological uniqueness over broad spatial extents using species distribution modelling
Published: 2021-05-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim: Local contributions to beta diversity (LCBD) can be used to identify sites with high ecological uniqueness and exceptional species composition within a region of interest. Yet, these indices are typically used on local or regional scales with relatively few sites, as they require information on complete community compositions difficult to acquire on larger scales. Here, we investigated how [...]
Accounting for seed rain and other confounders reveals which ecosystems are most susceptible to alien conifer establishment
Published: 2021-05-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Plantations of alien conifer species are common worldwide, and set to become even more prevalent in coming decades. To minimize the rate at which their offspring --- so-called "wildlings" --- colonize surroundings, and reduce the burden of conifer plantations on native ecosystems, managers need to know which ecosystems are most and least susceptible. 2. We compared how likely wildlings are to [...]
Utilizing Principles of Biodiversity Science to Guide Soil Microbial Communities for Sustainable Agriculture
Published: 2021-05-10
Subjects: Agriculture, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
While the positive relationship between plant biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) is relatively well-established, far less in known about the extent to which this relationship is mediated via below-ground microbial responses to plant diversity. Limited evidence suggests that the diversity of soil microbial communities is sensitive to plant community structure, and that diverse soil [...]
Male age alone predicts paternity success under sperm competition when effects of age and past mating effort are experimentally separated
Published: 2021-05-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Older males often perform poorly under post-copulatory sexual selection. It is unclear, however, whether reproductive senescence is due to male age itself or the accumulated costs of the higher lifetime mating effort that is usually associated with male age. To date, very few studies have accounted for male mating history when testing for the effect of male age on sperm traits, and none test how [...]
Comment on ‘Carbon intensity of corn ethanol in the United States: state of the science’
Published: 2021-05-06
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Energy Policy, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Policy, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Life Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Soil Science, Sustainability
Scully et al [1] in their recent contribution review and revise past life cycle assessments (LCAs) of corn-grain ethanol’s carbon (C) intensity to suggest that a current ‘central best estimate’ is considerably less than all prior estimates. Their conclusion emerges from selection and recombination of sector-specific greenhouse gas emission predictions from disparate studies in a way that [...]
Species’ traits drive amphibian tolerance to anthropogenic habitat modification
Published: 2021-05-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Anthropogenic habitat modification is accelerating, threatening the world’s biodiversity. Understanding species’ responses to anthropogenic modification is vital for halting species’ declines. However, this information is lacking for globally threatened amphibians, informed primarily by small community-level studies. We integrated >126,000 verified citizen science observations of frogs, with a [...]
Quantifying the checks and balances of decentralised governance systems for adaptive carnivore management
Published: 2021-05-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
1. Recovering or threatened carnivore populations are often harvested to minimise their impact on human activities, such as livestock farming or game hunting. Increasingly, harvest quota decisions involve a set of scientific, administrative and political institutions operating at national and sub-national levels whose interactions and collective decision-making aim to increase the legitimacy of [...]
Implementing network approaches to understand the socioecology of human-wildlife interactions
Published: 2021-05-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Human population expansion into wildlife habitats has increased interest in the behavioral ecology of human-wildlife interactions. To date, however, the socio-ecological factors that determine whether, when or where wild animals take risks by interacting with humans and anthropogenic factors still remains unclear. We adopt a comparative approach to address this gap, using social network analysis [...]
The economic value of fisheries, blue carbon, and nutrient cycling in global marine forests
Published: 2021-04-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Underwater kelp forests have provided valuable ecosystem services for millennia. However, the global economic value of those services is largely unresolved. Kelp forests are also diminishing globally and efforts to manage these valuable resources are hindered without accurate estimates of the services kelp forests provide to society. We present the first global economic estimation of services - [...]
Warming in the upper San Francisco Estuary: Patterns of water temperature change from 5 decades of data
Published: 2021-04-29
Subjects: Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Temperature is a key controlling variable from subcellular to ecosystem scales. Thus, climatic warming is expected to have broad impacts, especially in economically and ecologically valuable systems such as estuaries. The heavily managed upper San Francisco Estuary supplies water to millions of people and is home to fish species of high conservation, commercial, and recreational interest. Despite [...]
met v1: Expanding on old estimations of biodiversityfrom eDNA with a new software framework
Published: 2021-04-27
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
A long-standing problem in environmental DNA has been the inability to compute across large number of datasets. Here we introduce an open-source software framework that can store a large number of environmental DNA datasets, as well as provide a platform for analysis, in an easily customizable way. We show the utility of such an approach by analyzing over 1400 arthropod metabarcode datasets. This [...]