Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Complementando inventarios biológicos con datos abiertos a través de un método semiautomatizado
Published: 2023-12-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Introducción: Los muestreos directos constituyen la mejor manera de documentar la riqueza biológica de un lugar, pero pueden verse limitados por diversas circunstancias. Nos preguntamos si la riqueza de especies documentada en campo puede ser complementada con datos de plataformas digitales de biodiversidad. Objetivo: Analizar si los datos de ocurrencia de especies disponibles en la Global [...]
Divergent responses between lineages of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi to soil phosphorus and nitrogen availability
Published: 2023-12-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Soil Science
Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) associations are multifunctional. Two important functions they perform are facilitating nutrient uptake in host plants and protecting plants from biotic stress, among other functions. AM fungal taxa vary in how capably they perform these functions and can also respond differently to environmental selection. Therefore, there is a need to better understand how particular [...]
Bird species’ centrality in seed-dispersal networks varies within climatic niches
Published: 2023-12-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how the functional role of species within seed-dispersal networks varies across geographical and climatic gradients can reveal the drivers of network organization. Because bird-plant interactions differ depending on where these occur, species’ centrality (a measurement of species importance in the networks) is expected to vary across species’ geographic distributions. Using a global [...]
MEWC: A user-friendly AI workflow for customised wildlife-image classification
Published: 2023-12-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Monitoring wildlife is crucial for making informed conservation and land-management decisions. Remotely triggered cameras are widely used for this purpose, but the resulting 'big data' are laborious to process. Although artificial intelligence (AI) offers a powerful solution to this bottleneck, it has been challenging for ecologists and practitioners without substantial technical expertise to [...]
Urbanization alters sandy beach scavenging assemblages but not ecosystem function
Published: 2023-12-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Urbanization is rapidly transforming coastal landscapes around the world, altering the structure and function of marine, intertidal, and terrestrial ecosystems. In this study, we explore the impact of urbanization on the structure of vertebrate scavenging assemblages and the ecosystem functions they provide in sandy beach ecosystems across 40km of the central California coast, USA. We surveyed [...]
Quantifying clearance rates of restored shellfish reefs using modular baskets
Published: 2023-12-08
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management, Zoology
Shellfish reefs are among the most degraded ecosystems globally, prompting substantial efforts to restore them. While biodiversity gains of restored reefs are well documented, other ecosystem services such as water filtration remain poorly quantified. We present a novel way of measuring water filtration by restored reefs using modular restoration structures called Robust Oyster Baskets (ROB 400). [...]
Linking biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people (NCP): a macroecological energy flux perspective
Published: 2023-12-08
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Linking biodiversity and the provision of nature’s contribution to people (NCP) remains a challenge. This hinders our ability to properly cope with the decline in biodiversity and the provision of NCP under global climate and land use changes. Here, we propose a framework that combines biodiversity models with food web energy flux approaches to evaluate and map NCP at large spatio-temporal [...]
Towards the next generation of species delimitation methods: an overview of Machine Learning applications
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Biology, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics
Species delimitation is the process of distinguishing between populations of the same species and distinct species of a particular group of organisms. Various methods exist for inferring species limits, whether based on morphological, molecular, or other types of data. In the case of methods based on DNA sequences, most of them are rooted in the coalescent theory. However, coalescence-based [...]
Historical redlining impacts wildlife biodiversity across California
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Legacy effects describe the persistent, long-term impacts on an ecosystem following the removal of an abiotic or biotic feature. Redlining, a policy that codified racial segregation and disinvestment in minoritized neighborhoods, has produced legacy effects with profound impacts on urban ecosystem structure and health. These legacies have detrimentally impacted public health outcomes, [...]
Detecting context-dependence in the expression of life history tradeoffs
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Population Biology
Life history tradeoffs are one of the central tenets of evolutionary demography. Tradeoffs, depicting negative covariances between individuals’ life history traits, can arise from genetic constraints, or from a finite amount of resources that each individual has to allocate in a zero-sum game between somatic and reproductive functions. While theory predicts that tradeoffs are ubiquitous, [...]
Natural selection is less efficient at species range edges
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Changing species distributions due to global change underscore a pressing need to better understand range limits. However, our knowledge of general determinants of range limits remains poor despite over a century of work. Theoretical models demonstrate that genetic drift should strengthen across environmental gradients. This can limit natural selection to the point where populations can no longer [...]
Escape tendency and the mobility behavior of four alpine rodents do not change with altitude
Published: 2023-12-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Zoology
Behavioural responses are particularly important to quantify species-specific habitat influences on natural selection. Mountains, with their wide range of habitats, can be regarded as a valuable context where the environmental conditions influence animal behaviour. We studied the inter-specific variation in the escape tendency and the mobility behaviour in four alpine rodents’ species, a bank [...]
Functional coherence among miRNA targets: a potential metric for assessing biological signal among target prediction methods in non-model species
Published: 2023-11-30
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Although miRNA regulation of protein production is a likely target of adaptive evolution, high false-positive rates in the identification of mRNAs targeted by miRNAs in non-model species’ complicates interpretation of recent advances. Here we document the challenges and then outline steps for the community to address these challenges.
Vocal Dimorphism in Anna’s Hummingbirds
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Zoology
Whereas vocal sexual dimorphism is widespread amongst birds, it has been historically overlooked in non-passerines such as hummingbirds. By evaluating correlations among sex, behaviors, and vocalizations, the meaning and utility of intentional sound production may be inferred. Anna's Hummingbirds (Calypte anna) exhibit pronounced sexual dimorphism, with males being larger and having more vibrant [...]
this version should be deleted, it is duplicated
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
this version should be deleted it is duplicated with the ID 6292 which is the correct version. Please delete this entry. I don't know why you guys have created two entries and this one with a wrong file that reads for review only.