Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
How does dispersal shape the genetic patterns of animal populations in European cities? A simulation approach
Published: 2023-07-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Context and objectives Although urbanization is a major driver of biodiversity erosion, it does not affect all species equally. The neutral genetic structure of populations in a given species is affected by both genetic drift and gene flow processes. In cities, the size of animal populations determines drift and can depend on multiple processes whereas gene flow essentially depends on the [...]
Recent human-bear conflicts in Northern Italy: a review, with considerations of future perspectives
Published: 2023-07-17
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Zoology
The killing of a runner in Northern Italy by a brown bear (Ursus arctos arctos) and the subsequent investigation of such matter highlighted a Human-Wildlife Conflict (HWC) that has been present in Trentino since the introduction of bears for conservation during the Life Ursus Project. Such conflict may be exacerbated as both human and bear populations get bigger. In this paper, I summarize the [...]
The History and Development of Small Mammal Control on China’s Grasslands and Potential Implications for Conservation
Published: 2023-07-15
Subjects: Biodiversity
Grasslands make up 40% of China’s territory and are important ecological and economic areas. The native small mammals that inhabit these grasslands are often seen as pests competing with livestock and are subjected to population control. At the same time, several species are functionally important ecosystem engineers, and their removal can have far-reaching consequences for grassland health. We [...]
Measuring historical pollution: natural history collections as tools for public health and environmental justice research
Published: 2023-07-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Health Policy, Inequality and Stratification, Nature and Society Relations, Public Policy, Urban Studies and Planning
Background: Through the industrial era, environmental pollution has been unevenly distributed in the environment, disproportionately impacting disenfranchised communities. The distribution of pollution is thus a question of environmental justice and public health that requires policy solutions. However, we lack robust quantitative data on pollutants for many locations and time periods because [...]
Camtrap DP: An open standard for the FAIR exchange and archiving of camera trap data
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Population Biology
Camera trapping has revolutionized wildlife ecology and conservation by providing automated data acquisition, leading to the accumulation of massive amounts of camera trap data worldwide. Although management and processing of camera trap-derived Big Data are becoming increasingly solvable with the help of scalable cyber-infrastructures, harmonization and exchange of the data remain limited, [...]
Heterogeneous dispersal networks to improve biodiversity science
Published: 2023-06-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Dispersal plays a key role in shaping spatial patterns of biodiversity, yet its spatial heterogeneity is often overlooked in biodiversity analyses and management strategies. Properly parametrized heterogeneous dispersal networks capture the complex interplay between landscape structure and species-specific dispersal capacities. This heterogeneity, however, is recurrently neglected when studying [...]
Plant diversity dynamics over space and time in a warming Arctic
Published: 2023-06-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Plant Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average, and plant communities are responding through shifts in species abundance, composition and distribution. However, the direction and magnitude of local plant diversity changes have not been quantified thus far at sites across the Arctic. Using a compilation of 42,234 records of 490 vascular plant species from 2,174 plots at 45 study [...]
Breaking the Ice: A Review of Phages in Polar Ecosystems
Published: 2023-05-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology
Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that infect and replicate within bacterial hosts, playing a significant role in regulating microbial populations and ecosystem dynamics. However, phages from extreme environments such as polar regions remain relatively understudied due to challenges like restricted ecosystem access and low biomass. Understanding the diversity, structure, and functions of [...]
A Perspective on Conservation and Development
Published: 2023-05-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Demography, Population, and Ecology, Environmental Studies, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography
Since the industrial revolution, the predominant model of economic development has involved economies of scale and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, leading to environmental degradation and the ongoing mass extinction of species. The environmental impacts of this development-for(the sake of)-development model led to biodiversity conservation efforts that can be described as [...]
Biodiversity promotes resistance but dominant species shape recovery of grasslands under extreme drought
Published: 2023-05-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Climate, Life Sciences
1. How biodiversity underpins ecosystem resistance (i.e., ability to withstand environmental perturbations) and recovery (i.e., ability to return to a pre-perturbation state) and thus stability under extreme climatic events is a timely question in ecology. To date, most studies have focused on the role of taxonomic diversity, neglecting how community functional composition and diversity beget [...]
Social media records hold valuable information for conservation planning
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Here, focussing on Bangladesh - a tropical mega-diverse and mega-populated country, we examine the potential importance of social media [...]
Improving ecological connectivity assessments with transfer learning and function approximation
Published: 2023-05-04
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Environmental Monitoring, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistical Models, Sustainability
This is a conference paper presented at the ICLR 2023 "Machine Learning for Remote Sensing" workshop. Protecting and restoring ecological connectivity is essential to climate change adaptation, and necessary if species are to shift their geographic distributions to track their suitable climatic conditions over the coming century. Despite the increasing availability of near real-time and high [...]
Conservation macrogenetics
Published: 2023-04-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Genetic diversity is a core aspect of biodiversity that has been underrepresented in global conservation policy but is gaining rapidly increasing recognition. Conservation geneticists have traditionally focused on identifying, managing, and safeguarding the adaptive potential of specific populations or species. However, for almost all species, conservation relevant, population-level genetic data [...]
Repeated evolution of extreme locomotor performance independent of changes in extended phenotype use in spiders
Published: 2023-04-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Many animals utilize self-built structures – so-called extended phenotypes – to enhance body functions, such as thermoregulation, prey capture or defence. Yet, it is unclear whether the evolution of animal constructions supplements or substitutes body functions. Here, using Austral brown spiders, we explored if the evolutionary loss and gain of silken webs as extended prey capture devices [...]
Interspecific behavioural interference and range dynamics: current insights and future directions
Published: 2023-04-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Novel biotic interactions in shifting communities play a key role in determining the ability of species’ ranges to track suitable habitat. To date, the impact of biotic interactions on range dynamics have predominantly been studied in the context of interactions between different trophic levels or, to a lesser extent, exploitative competition between species of the same trophic level. Yet, both [...]