Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
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 [...]
Mapping migratory routes: Avian 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 [...]
Non-compliance and Under-performance 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 carbon stock changes are attributable to project activities, creating additionality risks. The low and variable rainfall in rangelands also [...]
Detection of energetic equivalence depends on food web architecture and estimators of energy use
Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecologists have long debated the universality of the energetic equivalence rule (EER), which posits that population energy use should be invariant with average body size due to negative size–density scaling. We explored size–density and size–energy use scaling across 183 geographically–distributed soil invertebrate food webs to investigate the universality of these fundamental EER assumptions. [...]
Microbial functional diversity and redundancy: moving forward
Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Microbiology
Microbial functional ecology is expanding as we can now measure the traits of wild microbes that affect ecosystem functioning. Here, we review techniques and advances that could be the bedrock for a unified framework to study microbial functions. We then explore the technical, ecological, and evolutionary processes that could explain environmental patterns of microbial functional diversity and [...]
Strong small-scale differentiation but no cryptic species within the two isopod species Asellus aquaticus and Proasellus coxalis in a restored urban river system (Emscher, Germany)
Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Zoology
Worldwide, humans have strongly altered river networks. Key changes resulted in modified hydromorphology, poor habitat quality and availability, migration barriers, and pollution. Restoration measures aim at mitigating anthropogenic stressors and to restore connectivity, but the biological success of the measures is not guaranteed. Analyzing genetic diversity and population structure of target [...]
The economic risk of the losses in pest control as frogs decline
Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Crop pests threaten agricultural productivity, causing significant economic losses and food security issues. Although various control methods exist, pesticide reliance raises health and environmental concerns. In this sense, the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a favored approach that minimizes pesticide use while incorporating diverse pest control methods. A key aspect of IPM is biological [...]