Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of The Agulhas
Published: 2024-07-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Agulhas is a regional ecosystem subgroup (Level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Agulhas Bank and KwaZulu-Natal that extend along the South African eastern coastline. The extent of the Agulhas mangroves in 2023 is 23.0 km2, representing 0.02% of the global mangrove area. Mangroves in this province are limited to 31 estuaries [...]
Snakes (Erythrolamprus spp.) with a complex toxic diet show convergent yet highly heterogeneous voltage-gated sodium channel evolution
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Chemical defenses shape ecosystems by orchestrating interactions between species and promoting specialization on toxic prey. Many toxins exist in highly biodiverse tropical ecosystems, sometimes in the same prey, imposing challenges for studying toxin resistance and requiring the development of new models. Royal ground snakes (Erythrolamprus) play a significant but understudied role as predators [...]
Traits, threats, and popularity explain extinction risk of birds globally
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
As the biodiversity crisis deepens, understanding extinction risk is essential for conserving at-risk species and triaging those potentially overlooked. Extinction risk is often estimated with traits (e.g. larger species are more vulnerable) without considering the context of threats or human bias in the listing process (e.g. more popular species are more or less likely to be listed). On the [...]
Match or mismatch: Tokay geckos adjust their behaviour to familiar and unfamiliar handlers but according to the context
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Animals need to distinguish among different con- and heterospecific individuals to be able to adjust behaviour appropriately. Behavioural responses towards familiar individuals might vary based on context in which they are encountered. However, such context dependent responses, while beneficial in the wild, can impact experimental results, increase error, decrease reproducibility and threaten [...]
Deciphering probabilistic species interaction networks
Published: 2024-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Representing species interactions probabilistically (how likely are they to occur?) as opposed to deterministically (are they occurring?) conveys uncertainties in our knowledge of interactions and information on their variability. The sources of uncertainty captured by interaction probabilities depend on the method used to evaluate them: uncertainty of predictive models, subjective assessment of [...]
Agricultural land use and reproductive behaviour constrain responses to summer thermal stress in a large herbivore
Published: 2024-07-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Agricultural land use and climate change are major global threats to terrestrial biodiversity. However, their interactive effects on synanthropic species are only recently being addressed. Behavioural plasticity is the most likely candidate mechanism for coping with rapid environmental change, yet behavioural adjustments may be insufficient when multiple anthropogenic pressures, such as human [...]
Disentangling variational bias: the roles of development, mutation and selection
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The extraordinary diversity and adaptive fit of organisms to their environment depends fundamentally on the availability of variation. While many evolutionary studies assume that random mutations produce isotropic phenotypic variation, the distribution of variation available to natural selection is more restricted, as the distribution of phenotypic variation is affected by a range of factors in [...]
Repeatability and intra-class correlations from time-to-event data: towards a standardized approach
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Many biological features are expressed as “time-to-event” traits, such as time to first reproduction or response to some stimulus. The analysis of these traits frequently produces right-censored data in cases where no event has occurred within a certain timeframe. The Cox proportional hazards (CPH) model, a type of survival analysis, accounts for censored data by estimating the hazard of an event [...]
Scanning the skies for migrants: Conservation-focused opportunities for a pan-European automated telemetry network
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Accelerated biodiversity loss during the Anthropocene has destabilised functional links within and between ecosystems. Migratory species that cross different ecosystems on their repeated journeys between breeding and non-breeding sites are particularly sensitive to global change because they are exposed to various, often ecosystem-specific threats. As these bring both lethal and non-lethal [...]
Assisted colonisation for ecosystem function: a thought experiment for the British Isles
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Climate change is driving the rapid reorganisation of the world’s biota as species shift their ranges to track suitable conditions, however habitat fragmentation and other barriers hinder this adaptive response for species with limited dispersal ability. The translocation of species into newly suitable areas to which they are unable to disperse naturally has been suggested to conserve species [...]
Measuring the edges of species’ geographic ranges
Published: 2024-07-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. The fundamental unit of spatial ecology is a species range: the geographic area that it occupies. Species ranges are delineated by range edges (also known as boundaries or limits). Why range edges occur where they do and not elsewhere, and what makes them move, has been an active area of research since the 19th century. In the present day, range edge dynamics are an important metric of [...]
A pattern-oriented simulation for forecasting species spread through time and space: A case study on an ecosystem engineer on the move
Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Modelling the spread of introduced ecosystem engineers is a conservation priority due to their potential to cause irreversible ecosystem-level changes. Existing models predict potential distributions and spread capacities, but new approaches that simulate the trajectory of a species’ spread over time are needed. We have developed novel simulations that predict spatial and temporal spread, [...]
Marine resources alter tundra food web dynamics by subsidizing a terrestrial predator on the sea ice
Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Predator use of resource subsidies can strengthen top-down effects on prey when predators respond numerically to subsidies. Although allochthonous subsidies are generally transported along natural gradients, consumers can cross ecosystem boundaries to acquire subsidies, thereby linking disparate ecosystems. In coastal Arctic ecosystems, terrestrial predators can easily cross into the marine [...]
Variation in the diversity of Sotalia (Cetacea:Delphinidae) dolphin whistle repertoires at a continental scale
Published: 2024-07-08
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
1. While cetaceans are known to produce large and complex acoustic repertoires, the challenges of exhaustively sampling sounds at sea and counting relevant signals has precluded an understanding of their true repertoire diversity. 2. Here we quantify and compare the whistle repertoires of 16 populations in the genus Sotalia, belonging to two sister species, the Guiana dolphin (Sotalia [...]
A Regulatory Mirage: Non-compliance with Regulatory Requirements in Australian Human-induced Regeneration Projects
Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The boom-and-bust nature of rangeland ecosystems makes them ill-suited to nature-based solution (NbS) carbon offset projects involving sequestration in vegetation and soils. The variability in these systems makes it difficult to determine whether observed stock changes are attributable to the project activities, creating additionality risks. The low and variable rainfall in rangelands also means [...]