Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Published: 2022-07-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
1. Functional diversity is widely used and widespread. However, the main package used to compute functional diversity indices FD is not flexible and not adapted to the volume of data used in modern ecological analyses. 2. We here present fundiversity, an R package that eases the computation of classical functional diversity indices. It leverages parallelization and memoization (caching results [...]
Published: 2022-07-16
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Individualized social niches arise in social groups and are associated with behavior and hormone (e.g. cortisol) concentrations. During sensitive life phases, social interactions can have a profound impact on the development of social behavior. Focusing on adolescence, we aimed to investigate the relationship between the social niche, social behavior, and cortisol concentrations (baseline and [...]
Published: 2022-07-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) provides a framework for the protection and recovery of threatened and endangered species and their habitats in the face of anthropogenic threats. Genetic information has played a role in decision-making under the ESA for decades, most commonly informing taxonomy and the designation of distinct population segments, though detection of inbreeding also played [...]
Published: 2022-07-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Whether modeling the evolution of a discrete or continuous character, the focal trait of interest does not evolve in isolation and require comparative methods that model multivariate evolution. Progress along these lines has involved modeling multivariate evolution of the same class of character and there are fewer options when jointly modeling traits when one character is discrete and the other [...]
Published: 2022-07-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Our understanding of the considerable variation in vertebrate brain size remains incomplete. Large brains are adaptive but brains require unusually high, near-constant energy inputs, and are prioritized energy targets. This trade-off also has understudied developmental consequences: immatures must develop a fully functional brain without already having one. We here propose that energy subsidies [...]
Published: 2022-07-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim: Historical processes like speciation, extinction, and historical dispersal are the ultimate factors generating and maintaining biodiversity in space and time. While detecting the effect of those processes on the distribution of biodiversity has great relevance by itself, how to measure them is critical to interpreting the underlying causes of biological patterns. However, metrics of [...]
Published: 2022-07-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Comparative analyses require researchers to not only ensure data quality, but also to make prudent and justifiable assumptions about data comparability. A failure to do so can lead to unreliable conclusions. As a case in point, we comment on a study that estimated the vulnerability of the world’s fish species to climate change using comparison between life stages (Dahlke et al. 2020, Science 369: [...]
Published: 2022-07-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Studies of viral adaptation have focused on the selective pressures imposed by hosts. However, there is increasing evidence that interactions between viruses, cells, and other mobile genetic elements (MGEs) are determinant to the success of infections. These interactions are often associated with antagonism and competition, but sometimes involve cooperation or parasitism. They involve mechanism [...]
Published: 2022-07-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Biotechnology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
Pathogen evolution is one of the least predictable components of disease emergence, particularly in nature. Here, building on principles established by the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution, we develop a quantitative, spatially-explicit framework for mapping the evolutionary risk of viral emergence. Driven by interest in diseases like SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, we examine the global [...]
Published: 2022-06-29
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Phenotypic plasticity refers to environment-dependent trait expression (Dewitt and Scheiner, 2004). Knowledge of phenotypic plasticity is important in virtually all areas of basic and applied biology. Researchers in applied fields (such as agriculture, medicine, public health, wildlife management, and conservation biology) have a vested interest in knowing how traits are or will be expressed [...]
Published: 2022-06-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Interactions between organisms are very diverse and attend to multiple biological demands, hence understanding ecological communities requires considering different types of species interactions beyond predation. In this work, we assemble for the first time the non-trophic networks of an Antarctic ecosystem. We report mutualistic (+/+), competitive (-/-), commensalistic (+/0) and amensalistic [...]
Published: 2022-06-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Quantitatively and predictively linking the composition and function of microbial communities is a major aspiration of microbial ecology. It is also a critical step in the path toward engineering synthetic consortia and manipulating natural microbiomes. The functions of microbial communities are collective properties that emerge from a complex web of molecular interactions between individual [...]
Published: 2022-06-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Parallel and convergent evolution are textbook examples of the role of natural selection in evolution. However, these terms are used interchangeably, and sometimes with conflicting meanings. This has resulted in confusion, which hampers the understanding of the processes underlying these important forms of evolution. In this synthesis, I discuss the issues with current definitions of parallel, [...]
Published: 2022-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Understanding the spatial context of animal movements is fundamental for establishment and management of protected areas (PA). However, these data are not readily available for large raptors, particularly for tropical species. We telemetry-tracked 36 captive-reared and wild-rehabilitated Harpia harpyja and estimated dispersal and space use after release in Mesoamerica. We evaluated the [...]
Published: 2022-06-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Policy makers require high-level summaries of biodiversity change. However, deriving such summaries from raw biodiversity data is a complex process involving several intermediary stages. In this paper, we describe a workflow for generating annual estimates of species’ occupancy at national scales from raw species occurrence data, which can be used to construct a range of policy-relevant [...]