Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Published: 2023-07-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Background Globally, the structure and functioning of foreshore and riparian ecosystems are being dramatically impacted by non-native invasive plant species. Invasive species can outcompete and replace native species, modify geochemical and hydraulic cycles, alter trophic processes, and change the composition and structure of communities above and below ground. However, these impacts are often [...]
Published: 2023-07-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Phenotypic plasticity has important ecological and evolutionary consequences. In particular, behavioural phenotypic plasticity such as plastic foraging (PF) by consumers, may enhance community stability. Yet little is known about the ecological conditions that favor the evolution of PF, and how the evolutionary dynamics of PF may modulate its effects on community stability. In order to address [...]
Published: 2023-07-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
1. Research in urban ecology and evolution relies on the use of deployable scientific equipment. If left unattended in the field, it may be prone to vandalism and theft, especially in the urban space. We empirically applied crime theory, specifically the Routine Activity Theory (RAT), to predict disappearance rates of scientific equipment in an on-going urban ecology research project. 2. [...]
Published: 2023-07-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
• Woody biomass is a large carbon store in terrestrial ecosystems. In calculating biomass, tree stems are assumed to be solid structures; however, decomposer agents such as microbes and insects target heartwood in stems, causing internal wood decay which is poorly quantified. • We investigated internal stem damage across five sites in tropical Australia along a precipitation gradient. We [...]
Published: 2023-07-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Background: Spatial information about the location and suitability of areas for native plant and animal species under different climate futures is an important input to land use and conservation planning and management. Australia, renowned for its abundant species diversity and endemism, often relies on modelled data to assess species distributions due to the country's vast size and the [...]
Published: 2023-07-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The rates at which journal articles in ecology and evolutionary biology make data and code available have been studied previously. This study examines how often this data and code, when available, can be used to computationally reproduce results published in articles. This study surveys the data and code sharing practices of 177 meta-analyses published in ecology and evolutionary biology journals [...]
Published: 2023-07-03
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Human language encompasses almost endless potential for meaning and folklore can theoretically incorporate themes beyond time and space. However, actual distributions of the themes are not always universal and their constraints remain unclear. Here, we specifically focused on zoological folklore and aimed to reveal what restricts the distribution of trickster animals in folklore. We applied the [...]
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Physiology
Parasitoids have an exceptional lifestyle where development is spent on or in a single host insect, but the adults are free-living. Unlike parasites, parasitoids always kill their host. How parasitoids use such a limiting resource, particularly lipids, is important for their chances to survive and reproduce. Lipid metabolism in parasitoids has been of interest to researchers already since the 60s [...]
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Global change stressors are altering the structure of ecological communities with significant implications for the functions and services that ecosystems provide. Coastal zones are particularly susceptible to such stressors, yet our collective understanding of the long-term effects of global change on these systems and, in particular, the consumer species found within them, is limited. The US [...]
Published: 2023-06-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Policy, Genetics, Life Sciences
Measuring genetic diversity of wild species using DNA-based data remains resource intensive and time-consuming for nearly all species. Yet, genetic assessments are needed for global conservation commitments including the Convention on Biological Diversity and for governments and managers to evaluate conservation progress and to prioritize species and populations to preserve and recover genetic [...]
Published: 2023-06-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Higher Education
Published: 2023-06-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Dispersal plays a key role in shaping spatial patterns of biodiversity, yet its spatial heterogeneity is often overlooked in biodiversity analyses and management strategies. Properly parametrized heterogeneous dispersal networks capture the complex interplay between landscape structure and species-specific dispersal capacities. This heterogeneity, however, is recurrently neglected when studying [...]
Published: 2023-06-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Engineering
Wind energy is developing on Mediterranean islands, where endangered populations of Griffon Vulture (Gyps fulvus) occur. As griffons are subjected to collisions with wind turbines while foraging, it is necessary to understand which factors affect their movements, to minimize the potential impact of wind farms. We assessed habitat use by 37 griffons (n. GPS locations = 130,218) and its overlap [...]
Published: 2023-06-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Insects play important roles in food chains, but quantifying how insect abundance affects population dynamics in natural communities is challenging. National scale monitoring data provides opportunities to identify trophic relationships at broad spatial and temporal scales but requires careful approaches to link data from different schemes. Here, using two monitoring datasets from Great Britain, [...]
Published: 2023-06-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
Fossil abundance data can reveal ecological dynamics underpinning taxonomic declines. Using fossil dental metrics, we reconstructed body mass and mass-abundance distributions in Late Miocene to recent African large mammal communities. Despite collection biases, fossil and extant mass-abundance distributions are highly similar, with unimodal distributions likely reflecting savanna environments. [...]