Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Functional assisted migration to sustain ecosystem functions under climate change
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Climate change is rapidly altering habitats, forcing many plant species to shift their distribution. However, slow dispersal rates and habitat fragmentation hinder their ability to track these changes, risking local extinctions and reduced ecosystem functioning. Current management strategies may not suffice to address these challenges. 2. We propose functional assisted migration (FAM) as a [...]
Projected climate change scenarios spatially decouple desert EFN-ant mutualisms
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Aim: Climate change is changing species distributions globally, but predicting these impacts on assemblages and their spatial overlaps under future scenarios is an ongoing challenge. Here, we explore how climate change influences distributions among two mutualistic assemblages. Location: The Mojave and Colorado Deserts, California, United States Methods: We developed stacked species [...]
estar: An R package to measure ecological stability
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Assessing ecological stability across populations or communities is a prime goal in biodiversity monitoring and conservation research. Quantifying stability is not trivial because its different aspects can be measured with various metrics. However, to date, no software enables measuring different stability metrics on ecological time-series data. 2. We present the estar R package that [...]
Repeated mitochondrial capture with limited genomic introgression in a lizard group
Published: 2025-02-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Mitochondrial introgression is common among animals and is often first identified through mitonuclear discordance — discrepancies between evolutionary relationships inferred from mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and nuclear DNA (nuDNA). Over recent decades, genomic data have also revealed extensive nuclear introgression in many animal groups, with implications for genetic and phenotypic diversity. [...]
Climate change intensifies plant-pollinator mismatch and increases secondary extinction risk for plants in northern latitudes
Published: 2025-02-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Climate change can lead to “secondary extinction risks” for plants owing to the decoupling of life-cycle events of plants and their pollinators (i.e., phenological mismatch). However, forecasting secondary extinction risk under future climate change remains challenging. We developed a new framework to quantify plants’ secondary extinction risk associated with phenological mismatch with bees using [...]
Northward expansion of the thermal limit for the tick Ixodes ricinus over the past 40 years
Published: 2025-02-14
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
The tick Ixodes ricinus is the main pathogen vector in Europe. Many speculations have been made about the effect of past climate change on the potential distribution of this ectothermic organism, despite a poor understanding of how climate change has resulted in distribution changes to date. In this study, we used a public cross-sectional dataset of I. ricinus abundance at the northern edge of [...]
Algorithm selection for optimal ecological monitoring design
Published: 2025-02-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Comprehensive monitoring of biodiversity to direct conservation action is foundational to addressing the ongoing biodiversity crisis. As integrative monitoring programs increasingly come online in response to multilateral biodiversity agreements, establishing best practices for optimal design is critical. Selecting the appropriate algorithm for identifying sample sites is both necessary for [...]
Location-scale Meta-analysis and Meta-regression as a Tool to Capture Large-scale Changes in Biological and Methodological Heterogeneity: a Spotlight on Heteroscedasticity
Published: 2025-02-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Heterogeneity is a defining feature of ecological and evolutionary meta-analyses. While conventional metal-analysis and meta-regression methods acknowledge heterogeneity in effect sizes, they typically as-sume this heterogeneity is constant across studies and levels of moderators (i.e., homoscedasticity). This assumption could mask potentially informative patterns in the data. Here, we introduce [...]
Seeing herbaria in a new light: leaf reflectance spectroscopy unlocks predictive trait and classification modeling in plant biodiversity collections
Published: 2025-02-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Reflectance spectroscopy is a non-destructive, rapid, and robust method for estimating functional traits and distinguishing species. Spectral reflectance libraries generated from herbarium specimens are an untapped and promising resource for generating broad phenomic datasets across space, time, and species. We conducted a proof-of-concept study using functional trait data and spectra from [...]
Harnessing meta-analyses’ insights in ecology and evolution research
Published: 2025-02-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Meta-analyses are powerful tools to synthesise the literature in several fields of study, including ecology and evolution. However, it remains uncertain whether ecologists and evolutionary biologists fully comprehend meta-analyses’ findings or effectively apply them when citing these studies in their own research. Here, we first discuss key meta-analytical concepts and provide a guide to [...]
Geography, taxonomy, extinction risk and exposure of fully migratory birds to droughts and cyclones
Published: 2025-02-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Anthropogenic climate change is predicted to drive unprecedented increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events, such as drought and cyclones. The impacts of these events on fully migratory species could be particularly severe and have cascading effects on the functioning of many ecosystems. We explore the relationships between geography, taxonomy, extinction risk and the [...]
Overcoming “doom and gloom”: Envisioning desirable futures for Arctic biodiversity
Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
We co-created visions of desirable futures for Arctic biodiversity during a workshop which included representatives from academia, Indigenous Peoples, business and policy-making. Appreciating our diverse perspectives, we identified key actions that would enable the positive outcomes shared in our visions: boosting education, rethinking Arctic biodiversity governance, elevating the voices of [...]
A new perspective on Squamate social cognition – the use of semiochemicals
Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The Social Intelligence Hypothesis suggests that cognition might be key to enable animals to live in social groups. Especially social cognition is important as it allows animals to respond appropriately to conspecifics and ensure group cohesion. Social cognition is extensively studied in mammals and birds but to gain a broad understanding of the benefits of social cognitive processes in social [...]
Evaluating modelling decisions and spatial predictions in ecosystem mapping
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ecosystem maps support a vast array of applications in conservation, land management and policy. The capacity of an ecosystem map to support these applications is determined by its ability to accurately represent ecosystem distributions, which is heavily influenced by the model used to produce them. Here, we evaluated the influence of key modelling decisions made whilst developing a new and [...]
Identifying the collector practices that shape spatial, temporal, and taxonomic bias in herbaria
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Natural history collections (NHCs) are essential for studying biodiversity. While spatial, temporal, and taxonomic biases in NHCs affect analyses, the influence of collector practices on biases remains largely unexplored. We utilized one million digitized specimens collected in the northeastern United States from 237 herbaria and analyzed contributions from ~10,000 collectors. We investigated (a) [...]