Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Fear of supernatural punishment harmonises human societies with nature
Published: 2024-09-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Human activities largely impact the natural environment negatively and radical changes in human societies would be required to achieve their sustainable relationship with nature. Although frequently overlooked, previous studies have suggested that supernatural beliefs can protect nature from human overexploitation via beliefs that supernatural entities punish people who harm nature. Studies of [...]
Quantifying Carbon Sequestration and Ecosystem Enhancement Through Novel Phytoplankton Farming Techniques
Published: 2024-08-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Farming phytoplankton has significant potential in addressing global warming and enriching marine ecosystems. Moreover, phytoplankton is more or less the ocean's small powerhouse, with the ability to sequester carbon, produce oxygen, and support food webs for marine ecosystems. To explore this potential, we developed new cultivation techniques to increase phytoplankton populations [...]
Rethinking Environmental Impact Assessment for nature positive development
Published: 2024-08-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Achieving nature positive development within existing regulatory frameworks will be challenging. Halting and reversing biodiversity loss requires restoration and enhancement of ecosystems alongside a fundamental shift in how we value biodiversity and assess quantifiable improvements. Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) focussed on mitigating negative impacts do not promote positive outcomes – [...]
On the use of directed acyclic graphs in behavioural ecology and evolution
Published: 2024-08-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are graphical models to visualise hypotheses. DAGs are generally used in the field of causal inference and their use is spreading across different fields. However, in biology and especially in behavioural ecology and evolution, DAGs are still underutilised. Here, we point out why DAGs are such useful tools for these fields. Using concrete examples, we demonstrate [...]
Quantifying disturbance effects on ecosystem services in a changing climate
Published: 2024-08-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Disturbances, such as hurricanes, fires, droughts, and pest outbreaks, can cause major changes in ecosystem conditions that threaten nature’s contributions to people (ecosystem services). However, approaches to assess these impacts on diverse services under climate change are rare. To advance such efforts, we build on the accelerating research on disturbance ecology and ecosystem services to [...]
Navigating the complexities of “One Health”
Published: 2024-08-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
For two decades, a One Health approach to managing the emergence of novel zoonotic pathogens has been increasingly called for by the animal and public health sectors. One health systems require the integration of data from wildlife indicator species, domesticated animals, and humans into a framework of monitoring and analysis that provides for early warning of impending pathogen spillover and [...]
A novel method to study the ecological role of sleep in small mammals.
Published: 2024-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Sleep, is a complex, vital, and universal behavior that strongly differs from mere inactivity. Its ecological role remains, however, largely unknown mostly owing to the lack of methodological tools to record animal sleep states in the wild. By using a small, low power consumption biologger, capable of recording brain activity, body movements, and core physiology, we were able to record and [...]
Current knowledge on the novel semiarid photovoltaic ecosystems and their impacts on biodiversity
Published: 2024-08-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is fundamental to mitigate the effects of global climate change. Renewable power capacity is increasing globally, and solar photovoltaic will be the dominant renewable energy source by 2050. Photovoltaic parks require great extensions of land, usually in drylands. But both ecosystems created by solar parks and the effect of solar parks [...]
Dormancy in the origin, evolution, and persistence of life on Earth
Published: 2024-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Life has existed on Earth for most of the planet's history, yet major gaps and unresolved questions remain about how it first arose and persisted. Early Earth posed numerous challenges, including harsh, noisy, and fluctuating environments. Today, many organisms cope with such conditions by entering a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity, a phenomenon known as dormancy. This process [...]
Multilevel societies: different tasks at different social levels
Published: 2024-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Multilevel vertebrate societies, characterised by nested social units, allow individuals to perform a wide range of tasks in cooperation with others beyond their core social unit. In these societies, individuals can selectively interact with specific partners from higher social levels to cooperatively perform distinct tasks. Alternatively, social units of the same level can merge to form [...]
Reversing the North American bumblebee decline: Looking at farming practices could be a solution
Published: 2024-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Wild bee declines have been documented worldwide, particularly in bumblebees, with some species in Nort America declining over 90% in the last 20 years. Climate change, land-use change from agriculture, pesticide use, and apiculture are the main drivers. The 2.2-hectare farm La ferme de l’Aube is the research site of a larger 3,082-hectare biodiversity reserve. The study area saw a 340% increase [...]
60 million years of ecological shifts in large herbivore communities revealed by Network Analysis
Published: 2024-08-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
The fossil record provides direct evidence for the behavior of biological systems over millions of years. In doing so, paleontological information becomes a key source to study the evolution of ecosystems and how they responded to major environmental shifts. Using network analysis over a dataset of worldwide large herbivores spanning the past 60 Myr, we found that large herbivore assemblages [...]
Phylogeny of Weinmannia (Cunoniaceae) reveals the Contribution of the Southern Extratropics to Tropical Andean Biodiversity.
Published: 2024-08-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Andes are a relatively young mountain range with impressive biodiversity, but the biogeographic processes underlying its hyperdiversity are still being unraveled. Novel mid- to high-elevation climates may have served as a biological corridor for the immigration of temperate-adapted lineages to lower latitudes, contributing unknown levels of diversity to this region. We tested the hypothesis [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Tropical Southwestern Pacific
Published: 2024-08-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Tropical Southwestern Pacific are a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Central and Southern Great Barrier Reef, Coral Sea, Fiji Islands, New Caledonia, Tonga Islands, Torres Strait Northern Great Barrier Reef, and Vanuatu. The Tropical Southwestern Pacific province mapped extent in 2020 was 874.0 [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of The Western India and Pakistan
Published: 2024-08-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Western India and Pakistan is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Western India and Pakistan. According to global data the Western India and Pakistan mangrove province mapped extent in 2020 was 1625.3 km2, representing 1.1% of the global mangrove area, while national and regional studies [...]