Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Text classification to streamline online wildlife trade analyses
Published: 2021-02-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1. Automated monitoring of websites that trade wildlife is increasingly necessary to inform conservation and biosecurity efforts. However, e-commerce and wildlife trading websites can contain a vast number of advertisements, an unknown proportion of which may be irrelevant to researchers and practitioners. Given that many of these advertisements have an unstructured text format, automated [...]
Acting in the Face of Evidentiary Ambiguity, Bias, and Absence Arising from Systematic Reviews in Applied Environmental Science
Published: 2021-02-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Evidence-based decision-making often depends on some form of a synthesis of previous findings. There is growing recognition that systematic reviews, which incorporate a critical appraisal of evidence, are the gold standard synthesis method in applied environmental science. Yet, on a daily basis, environmental practitioners and decision-makers are forced to act even if the evidence base to guide [...]
Promoting equity in scientific recommendations for high seas governance
Published: 2021-02-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
In the coming months, international negotiations under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) will enter their fourth and final session to establish a legally binding agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in one of our largest global commons, areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). In this context, scientists have proposed [...]
Ecological stoichiometry as a foundation for omics-enabled biogeochemical models of soil organic matter decomposition
Published: 2021-02-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Coupled biogeochemical cycles drive ecosystem ecology by influencing individual-to-community scale behaviors; yet the development of process-based models that accurately capture these dynamics remains elusive. Soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition in particular is influenced by resource stoichiometry that dictates microbial nutrient acquisition (‘ecological stoichiometry’). Despite its basis in [...]
Collection and analysis of a global marine phytoplankton primary production dataset
Published: 2021-02-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phytoplankton primary production is a key oceanographic process. It has intimate relationships with the marine food webs dynamics, the global carbon cycle and the Earth’s climate. The study of phytoplankton production on a global scale relies on indirect approaches due to the difficulties associated with field campaigns. On the other hand, modelling approaches require in situ data for both [...]
Lessons from a century of conservation translocations
Published: 2021-02-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Translocation—moving individuals for release in different locations—is among the most important conservation interventions for increasing or re-establishing populations of threatened species. However, translocations often fail. To improve their effectiveness, we need to understand the features that distinguish successful from failed translocations. Here, we assembled and analysed a global [...]
Oases in the Sahara Desert – Linking Biological and Cultural Diversity
Published: 2021-02-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
The diversity of life sensu lato comprises both biological and cultural diversity, described as “biocultural diversity”. Similar to plant and animal species, cultures and languages are threatened by extinction, too. Since drylands are pivotal systems for nature and people alike, we use oases in the Sahara Desert as model systems for examining patterns and trends of biocultural diversity. We [...]
CEUTA snowy plover open access data - COMMENTARY
Published: 2021-02-11
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Eberhart-Phillips et al. (2020, Scientific Data 7: 149) recently published a data-paper CeutaOPEN. However, the publication has significant shortcomings: the article does not explain the history nor the context of the project, it did not give credit to the developers of field methodology and data structure, and fails to acknowledge key contributions to the project. We request correcting these [...]
Retiring “cradles” and “museums” of biodiversity
Published: 2021-02-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In 1974, G. Ledyard Stebbins provided a metaphor illustrating how spatial gradients of biodiversity observed today are byproducts of the way environment–population interactions drive species diversification through time. We revisit the narrative behind Stebbins’ “cradles” and “museums” of biodiversity to debate two points. First, the usual “high speciation” vs. “low extinction” and “tropical” vs. [...]
Phylogenomic approaches to detecting and characterizing introgression
Published: 2021-02-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Phylogenomics has revealed the remarkable frequency with which introgression occurs across the tree of life. These discoveries have been enabled by the rapid growth of methods designed to detect and characterize introgression from whole-genome sequencing data. A large class of phylogenomic methods makes use of data from one sample per species to infer introgression based on expectations from the [...]
Thermal flexibility and a generalist life history promote urban tolerance in butterflies
Published: 2021-02-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Urban expansion poses a serious threat to biodiversity. Given that the expected area of urban land cover is predicted to increase by 2-3 million km2 by 2050, urban environments are one of the most widespread human-dominated land-uses affecting biodiversity. Responses to urbanization differ greatly among species. Some species are unable to tolerate urban environments (i.e., urban avoiders), others [...]
Urban tolerance of birds changes throughout the full annual cycle
Published: 2021-02-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim: Our objective was to quantify urban tolerance for North American birds across the full annual cycle. We tested (1) whether intra-annual variability of urban tolerance differed between migrants and residents and (2) whether intra-annual variability of urban tolerance was phylogenetically conserved. We then assessed how the relationship between ecological and life history traits and urban [...]
Male size and reproductive performance in three species of livebearing fishes (Gambusia spp.): a systematic review and meta-analysis
Published: 2021-02-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
1. The genus Gambusia represents approximately 45 species of polyandrous livebearing fishes with reversed sexual size dimorphism (i.e. males smaller than females) and with copulation predominantly via male coercion. Male body size has been suggested as an important sexually selected trait, but despite abundant research, evidence for sexual selection on male body size in this genus is mixed. 2. [...]
Corrections to Phytologia,vol. 102 (3) – Rumicastrum dielsii (Poelln.) Carolin is an “alien,” R. cylindricum (Poelln.) Carolin is Elatinaceae, R. monogynum (Poelln.) Carolin is incertae sedis, and the combination in Rumicastrum for Talinum nanum Nees was neglected
Published: 2021-02-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
In Phytologia 102 (4): 116–123, Hershkovitz recombined into Rumicastrum Ulbrich 65 Australian Montiaceae species originally classified in Calandrinia Kunth. Three of these species, all described by Karl von Poellnitz, do not pertain to Rumicastrum. The type specimen of Rumicastrum dielsii (Poelln.) Carolin is Calandrinia menziesii (Hook.) Torr. & A.Gray, a western North American species [...]
A 25-years population dynamics of sika deer in Kyushu Island, Japan: Estimation using vector autoregressive spatiotemporal model and evaluation of a large-scale management
Published: 2021-02-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Regional management of large herbivore populations is known to be effective in reducing local economic damages and conserving local endemic plants. However, herbivores often move across management areas, and the effect of population management on a large spatial scale is poorly understood, even though it is necessary to use a large-scale approach across multiple management units to implement [...]