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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Model-based ordination for phenological studies: from controlling sampling bias to inferring temporal associations

Hao Ran Lai

Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Multivariate Analysis, Statistical Methodology

Willig et al. (Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 15, 868--885, 2024) cautioned that unequal sampling effort and pseudoreplication can bias the characterisation of species phenology using circular statistics. Borrowing concepts from rarefaction, they proposed bootstrapping to control for time-varying marginal totals that arise from unequal sampling effort over time. This study extends their [...]

Validating causal inference in time series models with conditional-independence tests

James T Thorson, Cole C. Monnahan, Lauren A. Rogers

Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Sustainability

Ecologists often use time-series models to approximate dynamics arising from density dependence, species interactions, community synchrony, and other processes. Dynamic structural equation models can represent simultaneous and lagged interactions among variables with missing data, and therefore encompasses a wide family of analyses (linear regression, vector autoregressive models, and dynamic [...]

The Interaction Affinity Between Flowers and Their Pollinators

Zaal Kikvidze

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

It is a common knowledge that the probability of the fertilisation of a flower by its pollinator is a function of species abundances. However, this relation was rarely formalised for analysing pollination networks. In this opinion paper, a simple model borrowed from physical chemistry is introduced to formalise this functional dependence. This led to a well-known biochemical concept of affinity, [...]

MYB regulator of ‘colorless’ flavonols underlies the evolution of red flowers in Iochroma (Solanaceae)

Lucas C Wheeler, Maximilian Larter, Stacey D. Smith

Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

Anthocyanins, the pigments that give rise to blue, purple, red and pink colors in many flowers and fruits, are produced by the deeply conserved flavonoid biosynthesis pathway. The regulation of this pathway is thus fundamental for species differences in color across flowering plants, and a growing body of evidence implicates MYB transcription factors as key players activating or suppressing the [...]

Extremely low primary production after a decade long drought contributed to the local extinction of a group-living rodent

Annemarie van der Marel, Madan K Oli, Azad Hossain, et al.

Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Some species exhibit physiological and behavioral plasticity to survive adverse periods, such as changing climates or reduced food availability. Yet, during extreme climatic events the mechanisms to respond to these adverse periods may not be sufficient, potentially driving local population extinctions. We studied the population dynamics of a common degu (Octodon degus) population in central [...]

Measuring natural selection on the transcriptome

John R Stinchcombe, John K. Kelly

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Other Genetics and Genomics

The level and pattern of gene expression is increasingly recognized as a principal determinant of plant phenotypes and thus of fitness. The estimation of natural selection on the transcriptome is an emerging research discipline. We here review recent progress and consider the challenges posed by the high dimensionality of the transcriptome for the multiple regression methods routinely used to [...]

Socioecology and the role of scramble competition

Andreas Berghänel, Sarah Marshall, Friederike Range

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology

Ecological explanations for social organization and behavior are central to behavioral ecology. Unfortunately, the continuing mismatch between theoretical predictions and some empirical data led to increasingly complex hypotheses with numerous factors, raising doubts about their predictive value or even falsifiability. Moreover, several taxon-specific socioecological hypotheses have been [...]

Historical legacies of spatial and temporal climate exposure on thermal physiology shape butterfly vulnerability to recent climate change

Sarah E Diamond, Carmen da Silva

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Few observations are more indelible in ecology than widespread variation in the spatial and temporal occurrence of species. Although the mechanistic underpinnings of such variation are likely multifarious, temperature is argued to be a key driver. Understanding how temperature shapes species ranges and seasonal activity not only provides insights into historical biogeographic patterns, but also [...]

Minimal viable sound systems for language evolution

Adriano R Lameira, Steven Moran

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Physiology, Systems Biology

Human vocal gamut covers 3000 unique speech sounds comprising the world’s languages, with each new speaker having to learn the sounds of its new language. Since large, expandable repertoires are facilitated by vocal learning, this capacity has long been considered a prerequisite for speech and language evolution. The postulation of a vocal learning and repertoire size ceiling has, however, never [...]

Pattern-informed energetics: Energy allocation modeling for predicting trait variation and population persistence

Cara A. Gallagher, Viktoriia Radchuk, Melanie Dammhahn, et al.

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology

Energetics drive emergent ecosystem processes, shaping behavior and population dynamics in response to environmental conditions. While energy budget models can be used to effectively link resource dynamics to fitness outcomes, they often lack empirical grounding for energy allocation under resource constraints.  Here, we introduce the Pattern-Informed Energetics (PIE) framework, which [...]

Modelling the distribution of the tick Ixodes ricinus in England and Wales using passive surveillance data from citizen science reports

Mark Gideon Burdon, Maximilian Ayling, Nyall Jamieson, et al.

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Environmental Public Health, Public Health

Background: The tick Ixodes ricinus is the most common tick species in the UK and a significant vector of Borrelia burgdorferi s.l. (causative agent of Lyme borreliosis) and Tick-Borne Encephalitis virus (TBEv) to humans and Anaplasma phagocutphilum, Babesia divergens and louping ill virus to animals.Methods: The Tick Surveillance Scheme (TSS) administered by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) [...]

AmphiTherm: a comprehensive database of amphibian thermal tolerance and preference

Patrice Pottier, Rachel Rui Ying Oh, Pietro Pollo, et al.

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Thermal traits are crucial to our understanding of the ecology and physiology of ectothermic animals. While rising global temperatures have increasingly pushed research towards the study of upper thermal limits, lower thermal limits and thermal preferences are essential for defining the thermal niche of ectotherms. Through a systematic review of the literature in seven languages, we expanded an [...]

Individual variation in perceived density and its impacts on the realization of ecological niches

Ane Liv Berthelsen, Barbara A. Caspers, Nayden Chakarov, et al.

Published: 2025-03-06
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Organisms gain information about their local environment using different senses. Variation in both reception and assessment of stimuli leads to differences among individuals in their perception of environments. Here, we highlight the importance of acknowledging and investigating such individual differences by focusing on perceived density, the individual’s assessment of local density. We [...]

Indirect effects dominate ecosystem service losses in response to agricultural intensification

Agustin Vitali, Darren M. Evans, Fredric M. Windsor, et al.

Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Feeding a growing human population while preventing biodiversity loss is a major challenge. Land conversion impacts multiple ecosystem services (ESs), including food production and biodiversity-dependent services; yet, the role of indirect effects on ESs within this context, such as parasitoids boosting crop yield by controlling herbivores, remains poorly understood. Using species-network data [...]

Tracheal chambers as a key innovation for high frequency emission in bat echolocation.

Nicolas Louis Michel Brualla, Laura AB Wilson, Khizar Hayat, et al.

Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology

Key innovations play a crucial role in driving biodiversity and facilitating evolutionary success by enabling organisms to adapt to various ecological niches through the diversification of phenotypic traits. These innovations have been observed in different vertebrate clades, such as mammals evolving hypsodonty to graze on contemporary grasses and bats with the evolution of echolocation, [...]

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