Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity

Plant families exhibit unique geographic trends in C4 richness and cover

Samantha Munroe, Francesca A. McInerney, Greg Guerin, et al.

Published: 2022-04-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Numerous studies have analysed the relationship between C4 plant cover and climate. However, few have examined how different C4 taxa vary in their response to climate, or how environmental factors alter C4:C3 abundance. Here we investigate (a) how proportional C4 plant cover and richness (relative to C3) responds to changes in climate and local environmental factors, and (b) if this response is [...]

Hematological and Biochemical Reference Intervals of the Visayan Warty Pig in Negros Occidental, Philippines

Jacqueline Rose Tuale Alipo-on, Francesca Isabelle Escobar, Jemima Loise Novia, et al.

Published: 2022-03-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Animal Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Physiology, Zoology

The Visayan warty pig is one of the endemic species of the Philippines that have been listed as "critically endangered." Conservation actions and efforts, such as health assessments, are being carried out to preserve the population. However, there is limited information about the normal hematological and biochemical profile of the species. The study presents reference intervals essential for [...]

Plant spectra as integrative measures of plant phenotypes

Shan Kothari, Anna Schweiger

Published: 2022-03-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

1. Spectroscopy at the leaf or canopy scales is becoming one of the core tools of plant functional ecology. Remotely sensed reflectance spectra can allow ecologists to infer plant traits and strategies—and the community- or ecosystem-level processes they correlate with—continuously over unprecedented spatial scales. 2. Because of the complex entanglement of structural and chemical factors that [...]

Evidence-based Protection of Sea Turtle Eggs and Hatchery Practices

Andrea D Phillott, Nupur Kale

Published: 2022-03-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology

It is important for emerging conservationists and wildlife managers to gain experience in the use of evidence-based conservation, by way of critical analysis and understanding of the context and application of conservation actions. We developed a teaching case and activity for undergraduate and graduate courses in conservation biology, wildlife management etc., although it could also be adopted [...]

Developing a framework to improve global estimates of conservation area coverage

Rachel E. Sykes, Helen M.K. O’Neill, Diego Juffe-Bignoli, et al.

Published: 2022-03-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences

Area-based conservation is a widely used approach for maintaining biodiversity, and there are ongoing discussions over what is an appropriate global conservation area coverage target. To inform such debates, it is necessary to know the extent and ecological representativeness of the current conservation area network, but this is hampered by gaps in existing global datasets. In particular, [...]

Interpolation of temporal biodiversity change, loss, and gain across scales: a machine learning approach

Petr Keil, Jonathan Chase

Published: 2022-03-15
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability

1. Estimates of temporal change of biodiversity, and its components loss and gain, are needed at local and geographical scales. However, we lack them because of data in-completeness, heterogeneity, and lack of temporal replication. Hence, we need a tool to integrate heterogeneous data and to account for their incompleteness. 2. We introduce spatiotemporal machine learning interpolation that can [...]

An integrative indicator linking area-based actions to national and global outcomes for forest biodiversity

Simon Ferrier, Chris Ware, Jenet M Austin, et al.

Published: 2022-03-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences

Indicators supporting implementation of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) are likely to be used not only to monitor progress toward achieving agreed goals and targets, but also to help prioritise specific actions to address shortfalls in this achievement as efficiently as possible. To perform this dual role, adopted indicators must be derived from data of sufficient rigour and [...]

The Global Forest Health Crisis: A Public Good Social Dilemma in Need of International Collective Action

Geoffrey M Williams, Matthew D. Ginzel, Zhao Ma, et al.

Published: 2022-03-11
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Behavioral Economics, Biodiversity, Biology, Biosecurity, Botany, Economics, Entomology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Studies, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, International Relations, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Pathogenic Microbiology, Plant Biology, Plant Pathology, Plant Sciences, Political Science, Science and Technology Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Society is confronted by interconnected threats to ecological sustainability. Among these is the devastation of forests by destructive non-native pathogens and insects introduced through global trade, leading to the loss of critical ecosystem services and a global forest health crisis. We argue that the forest health crisis is a public good social dilemma and propose a response framework that [...]

Long-term trends in seasonality and abundance of three key zooplankters in the upper San Francisco Estuary

Samuel M Bashevkin, Christina E Burdi, Rosemary Hartman, et al.

Published: 2022-03-02
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology

Zooplankton provide critical food for threatened and endangered fish species in the San Francisco Estuary (estuary). Reduced food supply has been implicated in the Pelagic Organism Decline of the early 2000s and further changes in zooplankton abundance, seasonality, and distribution may continue to threaten declining fishes. While we have a wealth of monitoring data, we know little about the [...]

Mountain Gorillas benefit from social distancing too: Close proximity from tourists affects gorillas sociality

Raquel Costa, Valéria Romano, André S. Pereira, et al.

Published: 2022-02-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Gorilla tourism supports the protection of the gorilla ecosystem, benefiting humans and wildlife populations living therein. Assessing to what degree the presence and proximity of tourists affect wildlife aids long-term benefits. Because wild animals might see human activities as stressors, we hypothesised that the increased presence and proximity of tourists leads to an immediate increase in [...]

How has bird biodiversity changed over time? A review across spatio-temporal scales

François Leroy, Jiri Reif, David Storch, et al.

Published: 2022-02-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences

Empirical quantification of biodiversity changes remains a challenge even in well surveyed groups such as birds. This may be because the change depends on spatio-temporal scales, specifically on spatial grain (i.e. area of a sampling unit), geographic extent (i.e. size of the area of interest), temporal grain (i.e. duration of a sampling event), and temporal extent (i.e. length of the time [...]

Achieving global biodiversity goals by 2050 requires urgent and integrated actions

Paul Leadley, Andrew Gonzalez, Cornelia Krug, et al.

Published: 2022-02-25
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Plant Sciences

Human impacts on the Earth’s biosphere are driving the global biodiversity crisis. Governments are preparing to agree on a set of actions intended to halt the loss of biodiversity and put it on a path to recovery by 2050. We provide evidence that the proposed actions can bend the curve for biodiversity, but only if these actions are implemented urgently and in an integrated manner.

Drivers of community assembly change during succession in wood-decomposing insect communities

Sebastian Seibold, Wolfgang W. Weisser, Didem Ambarli, et al.

Published: 2022-02-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences

1. The patterns of successional change of decomposer communities is unique in that resource availability predictably decreases as decomposition proceeds. Saproxylic (i.e., deadwood-dependent) beetles are a highly diverse and functionally important decomposer group, and their community composition is affected by both deadwood characteristics and other environmental factors. Understanding how [...]

Graph embedding and transfer learning can help predict potential species interaction networks despite data limitations

Tanya Strydom, Salomé Bouskila, Francis Banville, et al.

Published: 2022-02-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences

Metawebs (networks of potential interactions within a species pool) are a powerful abstraction to understand how large-scale species interaction networks are structured. Because metawebs are typically expressed at large spatial and taxonomic scales, assembling them is a tedious and costly process; predictive methods can help circumvent the limitations in data deficiencies, by providing a first [...]

Past and future uses of text mining in ecology & evolution

Maxwell Jenner Farrell, Liam Brierley, Anna Willoughby, et al.

Published: 2022-02-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Ecology and evolutionary biology, like other scientific fields, are experiencing an exponential growth of academic manuscripts. As domain knowledge accumulates, scientists will need new computational approaches for identifying relevant literature to read and include in formal literature reviews and meta-analyses. Importantly, these approaches can also facilitate automated, large-scale data [...]

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