Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Microclimate shifts in nest-boxes and natural cavities before, during and after nesting
Published: 2022-01-17
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Physiology, Population Biology
Animals breeding in anthropogenic shelters such as nest-boxes experience nesting environment in which they did not originally evolve. Over the past decades, they are additionally challenged by climate change – a major environmental force influencing their reproductive ecology. Despite the central importance of nesting microclimate for offspring development and fitness, very little is known about [...]
Flower strips increase the control of rosy apple aphids after parasitoid releases in an apple orchard
Published: 2022-01-14
Subjects: Agricultural Economics, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Horticulture, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Mass releases of two parasitoid species, Aphidius matricariae and Ephedrus cerasicola, may provide an alternative measure to pesticides to control the rosy apple aphid Dysaphis plantaginea in organic apple orchards. As a proof of concept study, we tested if the presence of flower strips between apple tree rows could improve the action of three early parasitoid releases—and of other naturally [...]
Guidelines for the prediction of species interactions through binary classification
Published: 2022-01-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1. The prediction of species interactions is gaining momentum as a way to circumvent limitations in data volume. Yet, ecological networks are challenging to predict because they are typically small and sparse. Dealing with extreme class imbalance is a challenge for most binary classifiers, and there are currently no guidelines as to how predictive models can be trained for this specific [...]
Vulnerable, but still poorly known, marine ecosystems: how to make distribution models more relevant and impactful for conservation and management of VMEs?
Published: 2022-01-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Human activity puts our oceans under multiple stresses, whose impacts are already significantly affecting biodiversity and physicochemical properties. Consequently, there is an increased international focus on the conservation and sustainable use of oceans, including the protection of fragile benthic biodiversity hotspots in the deep sea, identified as vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs). [...]
Idea paper: Monitoring and databasing non-native species to manage establishment debt in aquatic ecosystems
Published: 2022-01-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
In the era of globalization, biological invasions are one of the most serious social issues. Thus, managing its impact is an urgent task. It is essential to control non-native species before they become established. However, it is insufficient to address establishment debt, which occurs when a non-native species has been introduced into an area but has not yet been established in the wild. In [...]
Reconciliation of evidence for the Portulacineae “backbone” phylogeny
Published: 2021-12-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Portulacineae comprise a clade of eight ostensibly monophyletic families, four of which (Anacampserotaceae, Montiaceae, Portulacaceae s. str., and Talinaceae) and part of a fifth (Didiereaceae) had been classified traditionally in Portulacaceae s. lato. The clade also includes Basellaceae, Cactaceae, and Halophytaceae. While available evidence strongly supports recognition of major clades within [...]
Global birdwatching data reveal uneven consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic
Published: 2021-12-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Birdwatching is a global phenomenon involving many thousands of people. Citizen science generates data providing insights into global patterns of bird distribution across space and time, yet how the pandemic may cast a longer shadow remains unassessed. Here, we explore whether pandemic restrictions influenced observations globally from 2020-May 2021, considering also GDPc and tourism income. We [...]
Quantifying research interests in 7,521 mammalian species with h-index: a case study
Published: 2021-11-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Taxonomic bias is a known issue within the field of biology, causing scientific knowledge to be unevenly distributed across species. However, a systematic quantification of the research interest that the scientific community has allocated to individual species remains a big data problem. Scalable approaches are needed to integrate biodiversity datasets and bibliometric methods across large [...]
Mexican agricultural frontier communities differ in forest dynamics with consequences for conservation and restoration
Published: 2021-10-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Forest regrowth is key to achieve restoration commitments, but a general lack of understanding when it occurs and how long secondary forests persist, hampers effective upscaling. We quantified spatiotemporal forest dynamics in a recently colonized agricultural frontier in southern Mexico, and tested how temporal variation in climate, and cross-community variation in land ownership, land quality [...]
A force competition of predator on urban ecosystem
Published: 2021-10-25
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Definitely the fact, is an undeniable impact of habitat change and fragmentation in the urban ecosystem take effect to species loss causes population decline into local extinction. The results that emerged from habitat selection in ecology in this case study may suggest possible opportunistic of population turnover are caused by behaviour adaptive in the life-history of predators. And provides [...]
Ecology and conservation of a living fossil: Australias Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis)
Published: 2021-10-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Horticulture, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Pathology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The iconic Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis) is a critically endangered Australian conifer and one of the world’s rarest trees with only 46 mature individuals remaining in the wild. The species is regarded as a ‘living fossil’ and was discovered on the brink of extinction following a natural historical decline. While its discovery has enabled crucial intervention for its long-term conservation, it [...]
NCBITaxonomy.jl - rapid biological names finding and reconciliation
Published: 2021-10-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
NCBITaxonomy.jl is a package designed to facilitate the reconciliation and cleaning of taxonomic names, using a local copy of the NCBI taxonomic backbone (Federhen 2012, Schoch et al. 2020); The basic search functions are coupled with quality-of-life functions including case-insensitive search and custom fuzzy string matching to facilitate the amount of information that can be extracted [...]
insectDisease: programmatic access to the Ecological Database of the Worlds Insect Pathogens
Published: 2021-10-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Curated databases of species interactions are instrumental to exploring and understanding the spatial distribution of species and their biotic interactions. In the process of conducting such projects, data development and curation efforts may give rise to a data product with utility beyond the scope of the original work, but which becomes inaccessible over time. Data describing insect [...]
The importance of ecotype diversity on duckweed growth with and without salt stress
Published: 2021-10-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Aims The pollution of freshwater ecosystems is threatening freshwater plant species diversity worldwide. Freshwater plants, such as duckweed (Lemna minor), are potentially sensitive to novel stressful environments. To test if ecotype diversity could increase resistance to stressful environments, I used seven L. minor populations and measured their growth rates with and without moderate salt [...]
Dactylogyridae 2022: a meta-analysis of phylogenetic studies and generic diagnoses of parasitic flatworms using published genetic and morphological data
Published: 2021-10-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Dactylogyridae is one of the most studied families of parasitic flatworms with more than 1000 species and 166 genera described to date including ecto-, meso-, and endoparasites. Dactylogyrid monogeneans have been used as model organisms for host-parasite macroevolutionary and biogeographical studies due to the scientific and economic importance of some of their host lineages. Consequently, an [...]