Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Roadkill in a time of pandemic: the analysis of wildlife-vehicle collisions reveals the differential impact of COVID-19 lockdown over mammal assemblages

Boštjan Pokorny, Jacopo Cerri, Elena Bužan

Published: 2021-07-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Population Biology

Collisions with vehicles are a major anthropogenic cause of mortality for wildlife, with conservation and evolutionary implications. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries worldwide enforced lockdowns which importantly reduced traffic, and therefore had unprecedented consequences for global wildlife populations. We modeled how the two lockdown periods in spring and autumn 2020 influenced [...]

The ecology of wealth inequality in animal societies

Eli Strauss, Daizaburo Shizuka

Published: 2021-07-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences

Individuals vary in their access to resources, social connections, and phenotypic traits, and a central goal of evolutionary biology is to understand how this variation arises and influences fitness. Parallel research on humans has focused on the causes and consequences of variation in material possessions, opportunity, and health. Central to both fields of study is that unequal distribution of [...]

What do we mean by multicellularity? The Evolutionary Transitions Framework provides answers

Caroline Rose, Katrin Hammerschmidt

Published: 2021-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

The meaning of the word ‘multicellularity’ appears to be unambiguous – a concept that can be grasped with common sense. On closer inspection, however, there is notable disparity in the recent literature regarding the usage of the term ‘multicellularity’, which can describe complex organisms, simple microbial colonies or even multi-species biofilms. In addition, while emerging research directions, [...]

Explaining preemptive acclimation by linking information to plant phenotype

Pedro José Aphalo, Víctor O. Sadras

Published: 2021-07-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences

We review mechanisms for preemptive acclimation in plants and propose a conceptual model linking developmental and evolutionary ecology with the acquisition of information through sensing of cues and signals. The idea is that plants acquire much of the information in the environment not from individual cues and signals but instead from their joint multivariate properties such as correlations. If [...]

Autocorrelation-informed home range estimation: a review and practical guide

Inês Silva, Christen H. Fleming, Michael J. Noonan, et al.

Published: 2021-07-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

1. Modern tracking devices allow for the collection of high-volume animal tracking data at improved sampling rates over VHF radiotelemetry. Home range estimation is a key output from these tracking datasets, but the inherent properties of animal movement can lead traditional statistical methods to under- or overestimate home range areas. 2. The Autocorrelated Kernel Density Estimation (AKDE) [...]

Flotsam and jetsam: a global review of the role of inputs of marine organic matter in sandy beach ecosystems

Glenn A. Hyndes, Emma Berdan, Cristian Duarte, et al.

Published: 2021-07-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Sandy beaches are iconic interfaces that functionally link the ocean with the land by the flow of marine organic matter. These cross-ecosystem fluxes often comprise uprooted seagrass and dislodged macroalgae that can form substantial accumulations of detritus, termed ‘wrack’, on sandy beaches. In addition, the tissue of the carcasses of marine animals that regularly wash up on beaches form a rich [...]

Impact of Developmental Temperatures On The Repeatability of Thermal Plasticity in Metabolic Rate

Fonti Kar, Shinichi Nakagawa, Daniel W.A. Noble

Published: 2021-07-05
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

Phenotypic plasticity is an important mechanism that allows populations to adjust to changing environments. Plastic responses induced by early life experiences can have lasting impacts on how individuals respond to environmental variation later in life (i.e., reversible plasticity). Developmental environments can also influence repeatability of plastic responses thereby altering the capacity for [...]

Re-examining extreme sleep duration in bats: implications for sleep phylogeny, ecology and function

Christian David Harding, Yossi Yovel, Talya Hackett, et al.

Published: 2021-07-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology

Bats are quoted as sleeping for up to 20 hours a day, an example of extreme sleep duration amongst mammals. Given that duration is one of the primary metrics featured in comparative studies of sleep, it is important that determinations of species-specific sleep duration are well founded. Here, we summarise the evidence for the characterisation of bats as extreme sleepers and discuss whether it [...]

Plant herbivore protection by arbuscular mycorrhizas: A role for fungal diversity?

Adam Frew, Pedro Madeira Antunes, Duncan D Cameron, et al.

Published: 2021-07-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences

The symbiotic association between arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi and terrestrial plants can enhance plant defences against insect herbivores. Despite advances in our understanding of how AM fungi affect plant tolerance and resistance based defence mechanisms, we contend that the role of fungal diversity in these interactions continues to be largely overlooked. This is problematic considering [...]

Restored off-channel pond habitats create thermal regime diversity and refuges within a Mediterranean-climate watershed

Jessie A Moravek, Toz Soto, Justin S Brashares, et al.

Published: 2021-07-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Cool-water habitats provide increasingly vital refuges for cold-water fish living on the margins of their historical ranges; consequently, efforts to enhance or create cool-water habitat are becoming a major focus of river restoration practices. However, the effectiveness of restoration projects for providing thermal refuge and creating diverse temperature regimes at the watershed scale remains [...]

From meta-system theory to the sustainable management of rivers in the Anthropocene

Núria Cid, Tibor Eros, Jani Heino, et al.

Published: 2021-07-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Ecological processes occurring at the regional scale, such as the dispersal of organisms, and spatial flows of material and energy are fundamental for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in river networks, yet they remain largely overlooked in most river management practices and underlying policies. We propose a meta-system approach where regional processes acting at different [...]

A review of the heterogeneous landscape of biodiversity databases: opportunities and challenges for a synthesized biodiversity knowledge base

Xiao Feng, Brian Joseph Enquist, Daniel Park, et al.

Published: 2021-06-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Abstract Aim: Addressing global environmental challenges requires access to biodiversity data across wide spatial, temporal and biological scales. Recent decades have witnessed an exponential increase of biodiversity information aggregated by biodiversity databases (hereafter ‘databases’). However, heterogeneous coverage, protocols, and standards of databases hampered the data integration among [...]

Deep learning as a tool for ecology and evolution

Marek L. Borowiec, Paul Frandsen, Rebecca Dikow, et al.

Published: 2021-06-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Deep learning is driving recent advances behind many everyday technologies, including those relying on speech and image recognition, natural language processing, and autonomous driving. It is also gaining popularity in biology, where it has been used for automated species identification, environmental monitoring, behavioral studies, DNA sequencing, and population genetics and phylogenetics, among [...]

Seasonally variable relationships between surface water temperature and inflow in the upper San Francisco Estuary

Samuel M Bashevkin, Brian Mahardja

Published: 2021-06-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management

Water temperature and inflow are key environmental drivers in aquatic systems that are linked through a causal web of factors including climate, weather, water management, and their downstream linkages. However, we do not yet fully understand the relationship between inflow and water temperature, especially in complex managed systems such as estuaries. The San Francisco Estuary is the center of a [...]

Integrating natural and sexual selection across the biphasic life cycle

Craig Purchase, Jonathan Evans, Julissa Roncal

Published: 2021-06-24
Subjects: Agriculture, Behavior and Ethology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Food Biotechnology, Food Science, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

An alternation between diploid and haploid phases is universal among sexual eukaryotes. Across this biphasic cycle, natural selection and sexual selection occur in both phases. Together, these four stages of selection act on the phenotypes of individuals and influence the evolutionary trajectories of populations, but are rarely studied holistically. Here, we provide a conceptual framework that [...]

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