Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Wolf depredation hotspots in France: Clustering analyses accounting for livestock availability
Published: 2020-11-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Depredation hotspots are the main source of conflict between humans and large carnivores. When locating depredation hotspots, previous studies have not adjusted for livestock availability, making it impossible for managers to discriminate hotspots resulting from underlying livestock clustering from those due to other factors such as environmental factors. We studied hotspots of wolf depredation [...]
Among tree and habitat differences in the timing and abundance of spring caterpillars
Published: 2020-11-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Climate warming is causing many spring biological events to advance in timing and where the phenology of resource and consumer advance at different rates this can result in trophic asynchrony. While the temperate study system of deciduous tree – caterpillar – insectivorous passerine has been widely studied, little work has examined whether phenological distribution of caterpillars differ among [...]
SVD entropy reveals the high complexity of ecological networks
Published: 2020-11-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Quantifying the complexity of ecological networks has remained elusive. Primarily, complexity has been defined on the basis of the structural (or behavioural) complexity of the system. These definitions ignore the notion of physical complexity, which can measure the amount of information contained in an ecological network, and how difficult it would be to compress. We present relative rank [...]
Workflow for constructing social networks from automated telemetry systems
Published: 2020-11-02
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
1. Advances in datalogging technologies have provided a way to monitor the movement of individual animals at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales, both large and small. When used in conjunction with social network analyses, these data can provide insight into fine scale associative behaviors. The variety of technologies demand continuous progress in workflows to translate data streams from [...]
Introduced Vespa velutina does not replace native Vespa crabro and Vespula species
Published: 2020-11-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Alien species invasion could lead to the replacement of native species with similar ecological requirements. Vespa velutina is an invasive hornet recently established in Europe, that is raising concern due to the associated economic and ecological impacts toward managed and wild pollinators besides to the potential competition and replacement of native wasp species. This led to the inclusion of [...]
Shifts between cooperation and antagonism driven by individual variation: A systematic synthesis review
Published: 2020-10-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The outcomes of interspecific and intraspecific ecological interactions can be considered to fall along continua from cooperative (mutually beneficial) to antagonistic (detrimental to one or both parties). Furthermore, the position of an interaction outcome along the continuum, for example whether a symbiont provides net costs or benefits to its host, or whether two conspecifics cooperatively [...]
Environmental conditions promote local segregation, but functional distinctiveness allow aggregation of catfishes in the Amazonian estuary
Published: 2020-10-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Cooccurrence patterns of species can appear through niche-related processes such as (i) environmental filtering matching specific sets of traits to a given environment, and (ii) limiting similarity selecting divergent functional traits to reduce niche overlap. Locally, both processes should act together to shape the distribution of species. We evaluated the importance of environmental variables [...]
Rock glaciers and related cold rocky landforms: overlooked climate refugia for mountain biodiversity
Published: 2020-10-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Mountains are global biodiversity hotspots where cold environments and their associated ecological communities are predicted to be threatened by climate warming. Considerable research attention has been devoted to understanding the ecological effects of alpine glacier and snowfield recession. However, much less attention has been given to identifying climate refugia in mountain ecosystems where [...]
Motif: an open-source R tool for pattern-based spatial analysis
Published: 2020-10-17
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
*Context* Pattern-based spatial analysis provides methods to describe and quantitatively compare spatial patterns for categorical raster datasets. It allows for spatial search, change detection, and clustering of areas with similar patterns. *Objectives* We developed an R package **motif** as a set of open-source tools for pattern-based spatial analysis. *Methods* This package provides [...]
Reducing land use-induced spillover risk by fostering landscape immunity: policy priorities for conservation practitioners
Published: 2020-10-15
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Immunopathology, International and Area Studies, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Parasitology, Population Biology, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Science and Technology Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Systems Biology
Anthropogenic land use change is the major driver of zoonotic pathogen spillover from wildlife to humans. In response to the global spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (the agent of COVID-19 disease), there have been renewed calls for landscape conservation as a disease preventive measure. While protected areas are a vital conservation tool for wildlands, more than 50% of habitable land is now [...]
Non-additive genetic effects induce novel phenotypic distributions in male mating traits of F1 hybrids
Published: 2020-10-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Hybridization is a source of phenotypic novelty and variation because of increased additive genetic variation. Yet, the roles of non-additive allelic interactions in shaping phenotypic mean and variance of hybrids have been underappreciated. Here we examine the distributions of male-mating traits in F1 hybrids via a meta-analysis of 3,208 effect sizes from 39 animal species pairs. Although [...]
Participatory mapping of aquatic invasive species: a demonstration in a coastal lagoon
Published: 2020-10-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Aquatic Invasive species (AIS) are a growing driver of change across marine and freshwater ecosystems but spatially-explicit information is seldom available for supporting management actions and decision making. Here we conceived and tested a new participatory method to map the distribution of three invasive species (Callinectes sapidus, Procambarus clarkii and Oreochromis niloticus) in the [...]
Insights from regional and short-term biodiversity monitoring datasets are valuable. A Reply to Daskalova et al. 2020 EcoEvoRxiv doi:10.32942/osf.io/cg3zs
Published: 2020-10-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Reports of major losses in biodiversity have stimulated an increasing interest in temporal population changes, particularly in insects, which had received little attention in the past. Existing long-term datasets are often limited to a small number of study sites, few points in time, a narrow range of land-use intensities and only some taxonomic groups, or they lack standardized sampling. While [...]
Epigenetics and the success of invasive plants
Published: 2020-10-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Biological invasions impose ecological and economic problems on a global scale, but also provide extraordinary opportunities for studying contemporary evolution. It is critical to understand the evolutionary processes that underly invasion success in order to successfully manage existing invaders, and to prevent future invasions. As successful invasive species sometimes are suspected to rapidly [...]
Combining mesocosms with models to unravel the effects of global warming and ocean acidification on temperate marine ecosystems
Published: 2020-10-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Ocean warming and species exploitation have already caused large-scale reorganization of biological communities across the world. Accurate projections of future biodiversity change require a comprehensive understanding of how entire communities respond to global change. We combined a time-dynamic integrated food web modelling approach (Ecosim) with a community-level mesocosm experiment to [...]