Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
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 [...]
A practical conservation tool to combine diverse types of evidence for transparent evidence-based decision-making
Published: 2021-10-01
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Making the reasoning and evidence behind conservation decisions clear and transparent is a key challenge for the conservation community. Similarly, combining evidence from diverse sources (e.g., scientific vs non- scientific information) into decision-making is also difficult. Our group of conservation researchers and practitioners has co-produced an intuitive tool and template [...]
Niche evolution and phylogenetic community paleoecology of Late Ordovician crinoids
Published: 2021-09-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Fossil crinoids are exceptionally suited to deep-time studies of community paleoecology and niche partitioning. By merging ecomorphological trait and phylogenetic data, this study summarizes niche occupation and community paleoecology of crinoids from the Bromide fauna of Oklahoma (Sandbian, Upper Ordovician). Further, patterns of community structure and niche evolution are evaluated over a ~5 [...]
Comment on “Information arms race explains plant-herbivore chemical communication in ecological communities”
Published: 2021-09-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Zu et al (Science, 19 Jun 2020, p. 1377) propose that an ‘information arms-race’ between plants and herbivores explains plant-herbivore communication at the community level. However, our analysis shows that key assumptions of the proposed model either a) conflict with standard evolutionary theory or b) are not supported by the available evidence. We also show that the presented statistical [...]
Matrix quality determines the strength of habitat loss filtering on bird communities at the landscape scale
Published: 2021-09-19
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Habitat loss represent a major threat to biodiversity, however, the modulation of their effects by the non-habitat matrix surrounding habitat patches is still undervalued. The landscape matrix might change community assembly in different ways. For example, low-quality matrices can accentuate environmental filtering by reducing resource availability and/or deteriorating abiotic conditions but they [...]
The potential contribution of private lands to U.S. 30x30 conservation
Published: 2021-09-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Coincident with international movements to protect 30% of land and sea over the next decade (‘30x30’), the United States has committed to more than doubling its current protected land area by 2030. While publicly owned and managed protected areas have been the cornerstone of area-based conservation over the past century, such lands are costly to establish and have limited capacity to protect [...]
Make natures role visible to achieve the SDGs
Published: 2021-09-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Economics, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Central to the premise of the Sustainable Development Goals is the concept that the environment underpins the economic and social dimensions of development, yet the language and structure of the SDG framework are largely blind to these environment-development relationships beyond the "nature" Goals (14 and 15). As a result, ecosystem health continues to decline, development milestones lag, and [...]
Harmonizing taxon names in biodiversity data: a review of tools, databases, and best practices
Published: 2021-09-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. The process of standardizing taxon names, taxonomic name harmonization, is necessary to properly merge data indexed by taxon names. The large variety of taxonomic databases and related tools are often not well described. It is often unclear which databases are actively maintained or what is the original source of taxonomic information. In addition, software to access these databases is [...]
Standardized NEON organismal data for biodiversity research
Published: 2021-09-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding patterns and drivers of species distributions and abundances, and thus biodiversity, is a core goal of ecology. Despite advances in recent decades, research into these patterns and processes is currently limited by a lack of standardized, high-quality, empirical data that spans large spatial scales and long time periods. The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) fills this [...]
The arrival and spread of the European firebug Pyrrhocoris apterus in Australia as documented by citizen scientists
Published: 2021-09-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
We present evidence of the recent introduction and quick spread of the European firebug Pyrrhocoris apterus in Australia, as documented on the citizen science platform iNaturalist. The first public record of the species was reported in December 2018 in the City of Brimbank (Melbourne, Victoria). Since then, the species distribution has quickly expanded into 15 local government areas surrounding [...]
What state of the world are we in? Targeted monitoring to detect transitions in vegetation restoration projects.
Published: 2021-08-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Monitoring vegetation restoration is challenging because ‘best practice’ monitoring is costly, requires long-term funding, and involves monitoring multiple vegetation variables which are often not linked back to learning about progress toward objectives. There is a clear need for the development of targeted monitoring programs that focus on a reduced set of variables that are tied to specific [...]
The potential contribution of kurī (Polynesian dog) to the ecological impacts of the human settlement of Aotearoa New Zealand
Published: 2021-08-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The pre-human Aotearoa New Zealand ecosystem was dominated by avian and reptilian species. Prior to first human settlement by East Polynesian colonists, the top predators were two giant raptorial birds. Aside from humans themselves, colonisation also resulted in the introduction of two novel mammalian predators into this naive ecosystem, the kiore (Pacific rat) and kurī (Polynesian dog). While [...]