Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Autocorrelation-informed home range estimation: a review and practical guide
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
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
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
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?
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
Published: 2021-07-02
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
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
Published: 2021-06-30
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
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
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
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 [...]
Optimizing stable isotope sampling design in terrestrial movement ecology research
Published: 2021-06-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. The recognition of adequate sampling designs is an interdisciplinary topic that has gained popularity over the last decades. In ecology, many research questions involve sampling across extensive and complex environmental gradients. This is the case for stable isotope analyses, which are widely used to characterize large-scale movement patterns and dietary preferences of organisms across taxa. [...]
The quantitative genetics of fitness in a wild seabird
Published: 2021-06-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Additive genetic variance in fitness is a prerequisite for adaptive evolution, as a trait must be genetically correlated with fitness to evolve. Despite its relevance, additive genetic variance in fitness has not often been estimated in nature. Here, we investigate additive genetic variance in lifetime and annual fitness components in common terns (Sterna hirundo). Using 28 years of data [...]
Impact of Infectious Disease on Humans and Our Origins
Published: 2021-06-19
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Arts and Humanities, Bacteriology, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biological Phenomena, Cell Phenomena, and Immunity, Cell and Developmental Biology, Cell Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetic Phenomena, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, Life Sciences, Medical Biochemistry, Medical Cell Biology, Medical Genetics, Medical Immunology, Medical Microbiology, Medical Molecular Biology, Medical Pathology, Medical Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Molecular Genetics, Pathogenic Microbiology, Pharmacology, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Virology
On May 16, 2020, the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny organized the symposium “Impact of Infectious Disease on Humans and Our Origins”. The symposium aimed to gather experts on infectious diseases in one place and discuss the interrelationship between different pathogens and humans in an evolutionary context. The talks discussed topics including SARS-CoV-2, dengue and [...]
Developing a Nature Recovery Network using systematic conservation planning
Published: 2021-06-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Conservation area networks in most countries are fragmented and inadequate. To tackle this in England, government policies are encouraging stakeholders to create local-level Nature Recovery Networks. Here we describe work led by a wildlife organisation that used the systematic conservation planning approach to identify a Nature Recovery Network for three English counties and select focal areas [...]