Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Published: 2022-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Novel viral pathogens are causing diseases to emerge in humans, a challenge to which society has responded with technological innovations such as antiviral therapies. Antivirals can be rapidly deployed to mitigate severe disease, and with vaccines, save human lives and provide a long-term safety net against new viral diseases. Yet with these advances come unforeseen consequences when antivirals [...]
Published: 2022-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Amidst a global biodiversity crisis, the word “biodiversity” has become indispensable for conservation and management. Yet, biodiversity is often used as a buzzword in scientific literature. Resonant titles of papers claiming to have studied “global biodiversity” may be used to promote research focused on a few taxonomic groups, regions, habitats, or facets of biodiversity [taxonomic, [...]
Published: 2022-09-12
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability
Collaborative assessments of direct replicability of empirical studies in the medical and social sciences have exposed alarmingly low rates of replicability, a phenomenon dubbed the ‘replication crisis’. Poor replicability has spurred cultural changes targeted at improving reliability in these disciplines. Given the absence of equivalent replication projects in ecology and evolutionary biology, [...]
Published: 2022-09-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Environmental monitoring is increasingly shifting towards a set of systems that describe changes in real-time. In ecology specifically, a series of challenges have prevented the roll-out of real-time monitoring for features such as biodiversity change or ecosystem service provision. Conservation culturomics, a field concerned with interactions between people and nature, is well-placed to [...]
Published: 2022-09-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Carbon and nutrient recycling by free-living microbial decomposers and fire - two key recycling pathways - are highly sensitive to climatic variation. However, mutualistic associations of microbiomes with plants and animals cause previously underestimated environmental buffering effects. This close cooperation between small and large organisms solves a fundamental allometric trade-off between [...]
Published: 2022-09-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Understanding which reproductive barriers contribute to speciation is essential to understanding the diversity of life on earth. Several contemporary examples of strong hybrid seed inviability (HSI) between recently diverged species suggest that HSI may play a fundamental role in plant speciation. Yet, a broader synthesis of HSI is needed to clarify its role in diversification. Here, I review the [...]
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn has influenced scientists for decades. It focuses on a progression of science involving periodic, fundamental shifts—revolutions—from one existing paradigm to another. Embedded in this theory is the concept of normal science, i.e., scientists focus on intricacies within the context of established theory, without challenging the underlying [...]
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Connecting adaptive phenotypic variation to both its genetic and ecological bases is one of the central goals of evolutionary biology. Birds, due to their ease of study and solid base of existing knowledge, present an ideal clade in which to advance that goal. Bird color traits in particular have a long tradition of being at the forefront of conceptual advances in evolutionary biology. Combined [...]
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In the field of niche modeling, data are often subject to multiple interacting sources of uncertainty, bias, and autocorrelation that make them difficult to analyze using traditional statistical approaches. Randomization is often used in statistical tests in order to estimate distributions that are difficult to specify analytically. Decades of development in the niche modeling literature have [...]
Published: 2022-08-30
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Anthropogenic climate and land use changes are the main drivers of biodiversity loss, promoting a major reorganization of the biota in all ecosystems. Biodiversity loss implies not only in the loss of species, but also entails losses in other dimensions of biodiversity, such as functional diversity, phylogenetic diversity and the diversity of ecological interactions.Yet, each of those facets of [...]
Published: 2022-08-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Aim: Assessing how different sampling strategies affect the accuracy and precision of species response curves estimated by parametric Species Distribution Models. Major taxa studied: Virtual plant species. Location: Abruzzo (Italy). Time period: Timeless (simulated data). Methods: We simulated the occurrence of two virtual species with different ecology (generalist vs specialist) and [...]
Published: 2022-08-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Birds display a rainbow of eye colors, but this trait has received relatively little study compared to plumage coloration. Avian eye color variation occurs at all phylogenetic scales: it can be conserved throughout whole families or vary within a single species, yet the evolutionary importance of eye color variation within species and across the avian phylogeny is also understudied. Here, we [...]
Published: 2022-08-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health
The urgent need for medical treatments of alcohol use disorders has motivated the search for novel molecular targets of alcohol response. Most studies exploit the strengths of lab animals without considering how these and other species may have adapted to respond to alcohol in an ecological context. Here, we provide an evolutionary perspective on the molecular and genetic underpinnings of alcohol [...]
Published: 2022-08-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Abstract Aim: Ecological niche model (ENM) or species distribution model is a modeling technique broadly used in ecology and biogeography and is increasingly used in decision-making regarding land use and biodiversity conservation. The methodology behind ENM applications is critical for model accuracy. One critical question that every ENM study faces is how to define a model training area. [...]
Published: 2022-08-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
It has been suggested that animals may have evolved co-operative breeding strategies in response to extreme climatic conditions. Climate change, however, may push species beyond their ability to cope with extreme climates, and reduce the group sizes in co-operatively breeding species to a point where populations are no longer viable. Predicting the impact of future climates on these species is [...]