Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Sunda Shelf
Published: 2023-08-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
"The 'Mangroves of the Sunda Shelf' is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology in the Sunda Shelf province. It includes intertidal forests and shrublands of the marine regions of the Malacca Straits, Gulf of Thailand, southern Viet Nam and the Sunda Shelf/Java Sea. This province has a tropical climate with protracted rainfall that provides very favourable [...]
Warming summer temperatures are rapidly restructuring North American bumble bee communities
Published: 2023-08-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
A rapidly warming climate is a primary force driving changes in biodiversity worldwide. The impact of warming temperatures on insect communities is of particular interest given their importance for ecosystem function and service provision and the uncertainty around whether insect communities can keep pace with the rate of increasing temperatures. We use a long-term dataset on bumble bee species [...]
A standard protocol for harvesting biodiversity data from Facebook
Published: 2023-08-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. The expanding use of citizen science platforms has led to an exponential increase in biodiversity data in global repositories. Yet, our understanding of species distribution remains patchy for most of the world. Social media data has the potential to reduce the global biodiversity knowledge gap. However, practical guidelines and standardised pipelines to harvest such data sources are still [...]
Gardens as drivers of native plant dispersal and conservation
Published: 2023-08-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Gardens hold untapped potential for participatory biodiversity conservation. Conservation gardening has recently emerged as a way to foster declining native plant species in urban and rural green spaces. But the impact of cultivating these species on population trends in the broader landscape remains underexplored. 2. Here, I study the effects of cultivating herbaceous native plants on [...]
Family-living and cooperative breeding in birds are associated with the number of avian predators
Published: 2023-08-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Cooperative breeding occurs when individuals contribute parental care to offspring that are not their own. Numerous intra- and inter-specific studies have aimed to explain the evolution of this behaviour. Recent comparative work suggests that family living (i.e., when offspring remain with their parents beyond independence) is a critical steppingstone in the evolution of cooperative breeding. [...]
Additions and Corrections to the Taxonomy of “Cistanthe arenaria” (Montiaceae)
Published: 2023-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
This work provides corrections and additions to a previously published taxonomy of Chilean plants classified as Cistanthe arenaria (Cham.) Carolin ex Hershk. The identity of Calandrinia bracteosa Phil. is discussed. Errors and omissions involving a table, figures and figure captions, and measurement are reported.
DAISIEmainland: an R package for simulating an island-mainland system for macroevolution on islands
Published: 2023-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Speciation and extinction of species are two of the most fundamental processes that are investigated in the field of evolutionary biology. Ideally, one would like to study these processes in replicated isolated systems. Islands come close to this setting if colonisation is rare. However, often we cannot directly measure when an island was colonised, when a colonist species speciated, or when [...]
Feedback loops drive ecological succession; towards a unified conceptual framework
Published: 2023-08-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The core principle shared by most theories and models of succession is that plant-environment (PE) feedback dynamics drive a directional change in the plant community, following a major disturbance. The most commonly studied feedback loops are those in which the regrowth of the plant community causes changes to the biotic (e.g., dispersers) or abiotic (e.g., soil nutrients) environment, which [...]
Botany and Geogenomics: constraining geological hypotheses in the Neotropics with large-scale genetic data derived from plants
Published: 2023-08-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Decades of empirical research have revealed how the geological history of our planet shaped plant evolution by establishing well-known patterns (e.g., how mountain uplift resulted in high rates of diversification and replicate radiations in montane plant taxa). Under this approach, information is passed from geology to botany by interpreting data in light of geological processes. Instead, in this [...]
Paws for thought: Impacts of animal husbandry on tundra greening in High Arctic Svalbard
Published: 2023-08-07
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Dog sledding in High Arctic Svalbard is a key tourist attraction, and the keeping of animals and livestock has historically been in practice in the settlements of the archipelago. The resulting waste disposal practices - particularly those involving the disposal of animal faeces and fodder - hugely enrich soils with excess nutrients. Here, we explore how animal husbandry affected changes in [...]
Leadership in Animal Groups: The Interplay between Individual Traits and Coordination Mechanisms
Published: 2023-08-07
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In social systems, movement of individual group members scales up to spatiotemporal dynamics of the group. However, the level of influence on group movement dynamics can be variable among group members. The influence of an individual is often referred to as their leadership potential. However, despite the common occurrence of leader-follower patterns across various taxa, little is known whether [...]
Assessing risk of ecosystem collapse in a changing climate
Published: 2023-08-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences
Climate change has pervasive impacts on Earth’s ecosystems, but the diversity and complexity of ecosystems makes estimating the severity of impacts and the resulting risk of collapse difficult. In this perspective, we conceptualise the challenge of understanding how climate change alters ecosystems, and how to reliably measure those changes in ecosystem risk assessments, focussing on the IUCN Red [...]
The need of decoding life for taking care of biodiversity and the sustainable use of nature in the Anthropocene - a Faroese perspective
Published: 2023-07-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Biodiversity is under pressure, mainly due to human activities and climate change. At the international policy level, it is now recognised that genetic diversity is an important part of biodiversity. The availability of high-quality reference genomes gives the best basis for using genetics and genetic diversity towards the global aims of (i) protection of species, biodiversity, and nature, and [...]
Practical guidelines and the EMLN R package for handling ecological multilayer networks
Published: 2023-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Network analysis provides a powerful framework to study the complexity underlying the structure, dynamics, stability, and function of ecological systems. By now, analysing single-layered networks is a common practice with clear guidelines and well-established computational tools. Nevertheless, ecological communities are multilayered because they vary over space and time and contain multiple types [...]
Multimodel approaches are not the best way to understand multifactorial systems
Published: 2023-07-23
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Information-theoretic (IT) and multi-model averaging (MMA) statistical approaches are widely used but suboptimal tools for pursuing a multifactorial approach (also known as the method of multiple working hypotheses) in ecology. (1) Conceptually, IT encourages ecologists to perform tests on sets of artificial models. (2) MMA improves on IT model selection by implementing a simple form of [...]