Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Estimating (non)linear selection on reaction norms: A general framework for labile traits
Published: 2021-03-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Individual reaction norms describe how labile phenotypes vary as a function of organisms’ expected trait values (intercepts) and plasticity across environments (slopes), as well as their degree of stochastic phenotypic variability or predictability (residuals). These reaction norms can be estimated empirically using multilevel, mixed-effects models and play a key role in ecological research on a [...]
Evolvability and the Fossil Record
Published: 2021-03-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The concept of evolvability—the capacity of a population to produce and maintain evolutionarily relevant variation—has become increasingly prominent in evolutionary biology. Although paleontology has a long history of investigating questions of evolvability, often invoking different but allied terminology, the study of evolvability in the fossil record has seemed intrinsically problematic. How [...]
Temporal Change Detection Analysis of Monroe County, NY tree cover from 2009 to 2017
Published: 2021-03-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Forests provide many ecosystem services which are enjoyed by nearby residing communities. This includes pollution and flood mitigation, carbon sequestration, oxygen production, food, fuel, education, recreation, and aesthetics. These ecosystem services also come from urban and suburban forests. Urban ecosystems, specifically urban green spaces services have been noted to improve human health [...]
Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model
Published: 2021-03-13
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biological Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Many researchers assume that until 10-12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands composed mostly of kin. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challenging this model and propose an alternative, the [...]
Climate change and plant reproduction: trends and drivers of mast seeding change
Published: 2021-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Climate change is reshaping global vegetation through its impacts on plant mortality, but recruitment creates the next generation of plants and will determine the structure and composition of future communities. Recruitment depends on mean seed production, but also on the interannual variability and among-plant synchrony in seed production, the phenomenon known as mast seeding. Thus, predicting [...]
Repeatability of endocrine traits and dominance rank in female guinea pigs
Published: 2021-03-11
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology
Background Glucocorticoids (e.g. cortisol) are associated with variation in social behavior, and previous studies have linked baseline as well as challenge-induced glucocorticoid concentrations to dominance status. It is known that cortisol response to an acute challenge is repeatable and correlates to social behavior in males of many mammal species. However, it is unclear whether these patterns [...]
Once an Optimist, Always an Optimist? Studying Cognitive Judgment Bias in Mice
Published: 2021-03-11
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Individuals differ in the way they judge ambiguous information: some individuals interpret ambiguous information in a more optimistic, and others in a more pessimistic way. Over the past two decades, such “optimistic” and “pessimistic” cognitive judgment biases (CJBs) have been utilized in animal welfare science as indicators of animals’ emotional states. However, empirical studies on their [...]
Capitalizing on opportunistic citizen science data to monitor urban biodiversity: a multi-taxa framework
Published: 2021-03-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Monitoring urban biodiversity is increasingly important, given the increasing anthropogenic pressures on biodiversity in urban areas. While the cost of broad-scale monitoring by professionals may be prohibitive, citizen science (also referred to as community science) will likely play an important role in understanding biodiversity responses to urbanization into the future. Here, we present a [...]
Deploying Ecological Countermeasures as a Biosecurity Imperative
Published: 2021-03-08
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Immunopathology, International Public Health, Life Sciences, Maternal and Child Health, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Population Biology, Public Health, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Veterinary Microbiology and Immunobiology, Veterinary Pathology and Pathobiology, Zoology
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought biosecurity to the forefront of national security policy. Land use change is a fundamental driver of zoonotic disease outbreaks, yet substantial study is yet required to unravel the mechanisms by which land use-induced spillover operates. Ecological degradation may be the 21st Century’s most overlooked security threat. Within the biosecurity context, we introduce [...]
Phyloreferences: Tree-Native, Reproducible, and Machine-Interpretable Taxon Concepts
Published: 2021-03-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Software Engineering
Evolutionary and organismal biology have become inundated with data. At the same rate, we are experiencing a surge in broader evolutionary and ecological syntheses for which tree-thinking is the staple for a variety of post-tree analyses. To fully take advantage of this wealth of data to discover and understand large-scale evolutionary and ecological patterns, computational data integration, i.e. [...]
Nonlinear ecosystem responses to leaf litter subsidies in experimental ponds
Published: 2021-03-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Subsidies of matter between ecosystems can strongly affect trophic interactions in food webs, yet most experiments apply a binary (i.e., subsidy vs. no subsidy) approach. This emphasis on extremes implicitly assumes linear relationships and fails to capture potential nonlinear effects in ecosystem responses along gradients of subsidy amount seen in real systems. To examine the effects of such [...]
How Individualized Niches Arise: Defining Mechanisms of Niche Construction, Niche Choice, and Niche Conformance
Published: 2021-03-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Organisms interact with their environments in various ways. We present a conceptual framework that distinguishes three mechanisms of organism–environment interaction. We call these NC3 mechanisms: niche construction, in which individuals make changes to the environment; niche choice, in which individuals select an environment; and niche conformance, in which individuals adjust their phenotypes in [...]
Large-bodied birds are over-represented in unstructured citizen science data
Published: 2021-03-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Citizen science platforms are quickly accumulating hundreds of millions of biodiversity observations around the world annually. Quantifying and correcting for the biases in citizen science datasets remains an important first step before these data are used to address ecological questions and monitor biodiversity. One source of potential bias among datasets is the difference between those citizen [...]
Do macrophytes act as restaurants for fishes in tropical beaches? An approach using stomach content and prey availability analyses
Published: 2021-03-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Tropical sandy beaches have low primary productivity, thus depend on external food sources. Generally, allochthonous macrophytes, form the basis of these food webs, and also may influence factors such as fish’s abundance, richness, species composition, and biomass. However, the role of macrophytes to the feeding ecology of fishes in tropical sandy beaches is uncertain. We aim to explain if this [...]
Towards monitoring ecosystem integrity within the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework
Published: 2021-03-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Signatory countries to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are formulating indicators through 2030 under the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). These goals include increasing the integrity of natural ecosystems. However, the definition of integrity and methods for measuring it remain unspecified. Moreover, nations did not achieve their 2011-2020 CBD targets, partly due to [...]