Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
A practical conservation tool to combine diverse types of evidence for transparent evidence-based decision-making
Published: 2021-10-01
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Making the reasoning and evidence behind conservation decisions clear and transparent is a key challenge for the conservation community. Similarly, combining evidence from diverse sources (e.g., scientific vs non- scientific information) into decision-making is also difficult. Our group of conservation researchers and practitioners has co-produced an intuitive tool and template [...]
Misinterpretation of genomic data matters for endangered species listing: the subspecific status of the Peñasco least chipmunk (Neotamias minimus atristriatus)
Published: 2021-10-01
Subjects: Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences
Puckett et al. (2021. Ecology and Evolution, 11, 12114-12128) evaluated the subspecies status of the Peñasco least chipmunk (Neotamias minimus atristriatus) using genomic approaches and concluded that their results did not support the distinction of this taxon as a subspecies and recommended it be synonymized with N. m. operarius. We refute the interpretations, conclusions, and taxonomic [...]
Detecting (non)parallel evolution in multidimensional spaces: angles, correlations, and eigenanalysis
Published: 2021-10-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Parallelism between evolutionary trajectories in a trait space is often seen as evidence for repeatability of phenotypic evolution, and angles between trajectories play a pivotal role in the analysis of parallelism. However, many biologists have been ignorant on properties of angles in multidimensional spaces, and unsound uses of angles are common in the biological literature. To remedy this [...]
Anticipatory responses to drought by plants: What are the environmental cues?
Published: 2021-09-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Water Resource Management
This study is an attempt to reconcile the physics-driven variation in reference evapotranspiration (ET0) and possible sensory-driven anticipatory acclimation that contributes to tolerance of dry weather spells and drought by plants growing in open fields. We use an original data set measured at high temporal resolution. These data include the standard meteorological observations plus detailed [...]
Emerging opportunities for wildlife with sustainable autonomous transportation
Published: 2021-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Autonomous vehicles (AV) are expected to play a key role in the future of transportation, and to introduce a disruptive yet potentially beneficial change for wildlife-vehicle interactions. How-ever, this assumption has not been critically examined, and reducing the number of wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) may be beyond current technological capabilities. Here, we introduce a new conceptual [...]
Niche evolution and phylogenetic community paleoecology of Late Ordovician crinoids
Published: 2021-09-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Fossil crinoids are exceptionally suited to deep-time studies of community paleoecology and niche partitioning. By merging ecomorphological trait and phylogenetic data, this study summarizes niche occupation and community paleoecology of crinoids from the Bromide fauna of Oklahoma (Sandbian, Upper Ordovician). Further, patterns of community structure and niche evolution are evaluated over a ~5 [...]
Learning from your mistakes: a novel method to predict the response to directional selection
Published: 2021-09-28
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Predicting how populations respond to selection is a key goal of evolutionary biology. The field of quantitative genetics provides predictions for the response to directional selection through the breeder’s equation. However, differences between the observed responses to selection and those predicted by the breeder’s equation occur. The sources of these errors include omission of traits under [...]
Sea ice and substratum shape extensive kelp forests in the Canadian Arctic
Published: 2021-09-24
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
The coastal zone of the Canadian Arctic represents 10% of the world’s coastline and is one of the most rapidly changing marine regions on the planet. To predict the consequences of these environmental changes, a better understanding of how environmental gradients shape coastal habitat structure in this area is required. We quantified the abundance and diversity of canopy forming seaweeds [...]
Comment on “Information arms race explains plant-herbivore chemical communication in ecological communities”
Published: 2021-09-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Zu et al (Science, 19 Jun 2020, p. 1377) propose that an ‘information arms-race’ between plants and herbivores explains plant-herbivore communication at the community level. However, our analysis shows that key assumptions of the proposed model either a) conflict with standard evolutionary theory or b) are not supported by the available evidence. We also show that the presented statistical [...]
Computational Modeling and Evolutionary Implications of Biochemical Reactions in Bacterial Microcompartments
Published: 2021-09-23
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biology, Life Sciences
Bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) are protein-encapsulated compartments found across at least 23 bacterial phyla. BMCs contain a variety of metabolic processes that share the commonality of toxic or volatile intermediates, oxygen-sensitive enzymes and cofactors, or increased substrate concentration for magnified reaction rates. These compartmentalized reactions have been computationally modeled [...]
Agricultural rewilding: a prospect for livestock systems
Published: 2021-09-23
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
CONTEXT: Agricultural intensification is a major cause of biodiversity loss. Biodiversity conservation and restoration generally involve human intervention. In comparison, rewilding, a radically different approach to address the erosion of biodiversity, aims to increase the ability of ecological processes to act with little or no human intervention, and thus to enhance biodiversity and the supply [...]
Matrix quality determines the strength of habitat loss filtering on bird communities at the landscape scale
Published: 2021-09-20
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Habitat loss represent a major threat to biodiversity, however, the modulation of their effects by the non-habitat matrix surrounding habitat patches is still undervalued. The landscape matrix might change community assembly in different ways. For example, low-quality matrices can accentuate environmental filtering by reducing resource availability and/or deteriorating abiotic conditions but they [...]
Many defense systems in microbial genomes, but which is defending whom from what?
Published: 2021-09-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Other Microbiology
Prokaryotes have numerous mobile genetic elements (MGE) that mediate horizontal gene transfer between cells. These elements can be costly, even deadly, and cells use numerous defense systems to filter, control or inactivate them. Surprisingly, many phages, conjugative plasmids, and their parasites, phage satellites or mobilizable plasmids, encode defense systems homologous to those of bacteria. [...]
The importance of alternative splicing in adaptive evolution
Published: 2021-09-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Although alternative splicing is a ubiquitous gene regulatory mechanism in plants and animals, its contribution to evolutionary transitions is understudied. Splicing enables different mRNA isoforms to be generated from the same gene, expanding transcriptomic and proteomic diversity. While the role of gene expression in adaptive evolution is widely accepted, biologists still debate the functional [...]
Glucocorticoids coordinate changes in gut microbiome composition in wild North American red squirrels
Published: 2021-09-17
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Gut microbiome diversity plays an important role in host health and fitness, in part through the diversification of gut metabolic function and pathogen protection. Elevations in glucocorticoids (GCs) appear to reduce gut microbiome diversity in experimental studies, suggesting that a loss of microbial diversity may be a negative consequence of increased GCs. However, given that ecological factors [...]