Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Accounting for year effects and sampling error in temporal analyses of population and biodiversity change - Response to Seibold et al. 2019 “Arthropod decline in grasslands and forests is associated with landscape-level drivers”
Published: 2020-10-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
An accumulating number of studies are reporting severe biomass, abundance and/or species richness declines of insects (Hallmann et al., 2017; Lister & Garcia, 2018; Seibold et al., 2019; Sánchez-Bayo & Wyckhuys, 2019). Collectively these studies aim to quantify the net change in invertebrate populations and/or community composition over time and to establish whether such changes can be [...]
Limited effect of COVID-19 on the 2020 fire season in Mediterranean Europe
Published: 2020-10-10
Subjects: Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
In a recent study, Rodrigues et al. (2020) analyze the impact of COVID-19 on fire activity. During this year’s pandemic we have experienced extreme fire activity in many areas worldwide including Siberia (McCarty et al., 2020), western US (Pickrell and Pennisi, 2020), and different Latin American countries including Argentina, Bolivia or Paraguay. Interestingly, the authors argue that COVID-19 [...]
Phylogenetic Comparative Methods: A User’s Guide for Paleontologists
Published: 2020-10-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Recent advances in statistical approaches called Phylogenetic Comparative Methods (PCMs) have provided paleontologists with a powerful set of analytical tools for investigating evolutionary tempo and mode in fossil lineages. However, attempts to integrate PCMs with fossil data often present workers with practical challenges or unfamiliar literature. In this paper, we present guides to the theory [...]
Reported individual costs and benefits of sharing open data among Canadian academic faculty in ecology and evolution
Published: 2020-10-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Open data facilitate reproducibility and accelerate scientific discovery but are hindered by perceptions that researchers bear costs and gain few benefits from publicly sharing their data, with limited empirical evidence to the contrary. We surveyed 140 faculty members working in ecology and evolution across Canada’s top 20-ranked universities and found that more researchers report benefits [...]
Is Human Society an Organism Made of Many Animals?
Published: 2020-10-04
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Sociology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology
Social organism theories of the past have defined human societies as “biological organisms”, similar to animals or plants. This present work draws from the recent technological breakthroughs in both biology and astronomy to define the worldwide human society as a “multizoa organism”, i.e. an organism made of many animals. The paper then puts forth the idea that as a multizoa organism, human [...]
Including Rural America in academic conservation science
Published: 2020-10-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Law, Law, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Entrenched political partisanship in the United States has placed long-standing constraints on conservation policy and climate change legislation. These barriers persist, demanding fresh insights into the ways that conservation has become a victim of political polarization, and pathways for encouraging bipartisan support for climate change and other U.S. conservation policies. We suggest three [...]
Impacts of human disturbance in marine mammals: Do behavioral changes translate to disease consequences? Full methods and Analysis
Published: 2020-10-01
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Humans have been altering wildlife habitats and wildlife behavior worldwide at an accelerated pace in recent decades. While it is well-understood how human-induced behavioral changes affect infectious disease risk in terrestrial wildlife, less is known in marine life. Here we examine this link in marine mammal populations by (1) conducting a systematic literature review to determine how human [...]
Understanding biological resilience, from genes to ecosystems
Published: 2020-10-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The natural world is under unprecedented and accelerating pressure. Much work on understanding resilience to local and global environmental change has, so far, focussed on ecosystems. However, understanding a system’s behaviour requires knowledge of its component parts and their interactions. Here we present a framework for understanding ‘biological resilience’, or the processes that enable [...]
Synergistic impacts of anthropogenic fires and aridity on plant diversity in the Western Ghats: Implications for management of ancient social-ecological systems
Published: 2020-10-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Identifying the impacts of anthropogenic fires on biodiversity is imperative for human-influenced tropical rainforests because: i) these ecosystems have been transformed by human-induced fires for millennia; and ii) their effective management is essential for protecting the world’s terrestrial biodiversity in the face of global environmental change. While several short-term studies elucidate the [...]
A fine balance: specialized questioning techniques and their use in conservation
Published: 2020-10-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Conservationists measuring noncompliance with rules about the exploitation of natural resources often need to ask sensitive questions. However, respondents can introduce bias through distorting their answers to direct questions, due to social norms and/or the risk of legal sanctions. Specialized Questioning Techniques (SQTs) are often a more suitable approach to counteracting respondent bias, as [...]
Combining social information use and comfort-seeking for nest site selection in a cavity-nesting raptor
Published: 2020-09-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology
When selecting a breeding site, individuals can use social information to reduce the uncertainty regarding habitat quality. In particular, individuals from several bird species tend to reuse nests previously occupied by competitors. Re-occupying nests previously used by conspecifics or heterospecifics could result from exploiting social information by copying competitors’ choice (the ‘social [...]
A call to action: Understanding land use-induced zoonotic spillover to protect environmental, animal, and human health
Published: 2020-09-25
Subjects: Animal Diseases, Biodiversity, Biology, Diseases, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Parasitic Diseases, Public Health, Systems Biology, Veterinary Medicine
The rapid, global spread and human health impacts of SARS-CoV-2, the agent of COVID-19 disease, demonstrates humanity’s vulnerability to zoonotic disease pandemics. Although anthropogenic land use change is known to be the major driver of zoonotic pathogen spillover from wildlife to human populations, the scientific underpinnings of land use-induced zoonotic spillover have rarely been [...]
Sexual dichromatism, size dimorphism and microscale anatomy of white wing stripe in blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus)
Published: 2020-09-24
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences
Achromatic patches are a common element of plumage patterns in many bird species and there is growing body of evidence that in many avian taxa they can play a signaling role in mate choice. Although the blue tit is a well-established model species in the studies on colouration, its white wing patch has never been examined in the context of sex-specific trait expression. In this exploratory study, [...]
Cushion plants act as facilitators for soil microarthropods in high alpine Sweden
Published: 2020-09-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Cushion plants can have positive impacts on plant richness in severe environments and possibly across trophic levels on arthropods, an under-studied topic. 2. This study examined whether soil communities under cushions of Silene acaulis and Diapensia lapponica have higher richness and abundance of soil microarthropods (Acari, Collembola) than adjacent non-cushion vegetation; and whether [...]
GoogleTrends reflects the abundance of the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus): a call for the web-based surveillance of invasive alien vector species
Published: 2020-09-23
Subjects: Entomology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) is becoming widespread in Europe, where it can transmit some major arboviruses, including Chikungunya and Dengue. While surveillance initiatives are being implemented and harmonized between states, the spread of A.albopictus is outrunning them and cost-effective surveillance tools are needed. In this study, we tested whether on-line searches on Google [...]