Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Opportunity Begets Opportunity to Drive Macroevolutionary Dynamics of a Diverse Lizard Radiation
Published: 2024-01-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Evolution proceeds unevenly across the tree of life, with some lineages accumulating diversity more rapidly than others. Explaining this disparity is challenging as similar evolutionary triggers often do not result in analogous shifts across the tree, and similar shifts may reflect different evolutionary triggers. We used a combination of approaches to directly consider such context-dependency [...]
A big data and machine learning approach for monitoring the condition of ecosystems
Published: 2024-01-16
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecosystems are highly valuable as a source of goods and services and as a heritage for future generations. Knowing their condition is extremely important for all management and conservation activities and public policies. Until now, the evaluation of ecosystem condition has been unsatisfactory and thus lacks practical implementation for most countries. We propose that ecosystem integrity is a [...]
Meta-analysis reveals that the effects of precipitation change on soil and litter fauna in forests depend on body size
Published: 2024-01-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Anthropogenic climate change is altering precipitation regimes at a global scale. While precipitation changes have been linked to changes in the abundance and diversity of soil and litter invertebrate fauna in forests, general trends have remained elusive due to mixed results from primary studies. We used a meta-analysis based on 352 comparisons from 30 primary studies to address associated [...]
Closing Farmland Biodiversity Knowledge Gaps with Digital Agriculture
Published: 2023-12-23
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity
Digital agriculture and biodiversity monitoring share many data collection technologies and analytical methods, yet remain siloed. We propose a pathway to harness Digital Agriculture data streams for dynamic, near-real-time assessments of biodiversity-yield interactions aligned with policy-relevant indicators. Bridging these fields, enabled by advances in science and policy, can enhance farmland [...]
A structured approach for building multi-community state-and-transition models to support conservation planning
Published: 2023-12-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Global declines in ecosystem extent and condition mean there is an increasing demand for recovery and conservation plans. Conservation plans for ecological communities require a management framework with measurable, time-bound objectives. Efficient and structured processes that facilitate timely and comparable conservation plans are essential, especially where resources are constrained. We [...]
Ecosystem functions and services provided by dung beetles: a global meta-analysis
Published: 2023-12-19
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Dung beetles are known to carry out a range of ecosystem functions such as secondary seed dispersal, bioturbation, nutrient cycling, plant growth, pest and parasite control, and trophic regulation, many of which support key ecosystem services. Despite the globally purported significance of this group of insects for ecosystem functioning, there has been no quantitative synthesis to establish the [...]
Complementando inventarios biológicos con datos abiertos a través de un método semiautomatizado
Published: 2023-12-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Introducción: Los muestreos directos constituyen la mejor manera de documentar la riqueza biológica de un lugar, pero pueden verse limitados por diversas circunstancias. Nos preguntamos si la riqueza de especies documentada en campo puede ser complementada con datos de plataformas digitales de biodiversidad. Objetivo: Analizar si los datos de ocurrencia de especies disponibles en la Global [...]
Bird species’ centrality in seed-dispersal networks varies within climatic niches
Published: 2023-12-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how the functional role of species within seed-dispersal networks varies across geographical and climatic gradients can reveal the drivers of network organization. Because bird-plant interactions differ depending on where these occur, species’ centrality (a measurement of species importance in the networks) is expected to vary across species’ geographic distributions. Using a global [...]
MEWC: A user-friendly AI workflow for customised wildlife-image classification
Published: 2023-12-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Monitoring wildlife is crucial for making informed conservation and land-management decisions. Remotely triggered cameras are widely used for this purpose, but the resulting 'big data' are laborious to process. Although artificial intelligence (AI) offers a powerful solution to this bottleneck, it has been challenging for ecologists and practitioners without substantial technical expertise to [...]
The world was our oyster: Records reveal the vast historical extent of European oyster reef ecosystems
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Marine Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Anthropogenic activities have impacted marine ecosystems at extraordinary scales. Biogenic reef ecosystems built by the European flat oyster (Ostrea edulis) typically declined prior to scientific monitoring. Collating >1,600 records published over 350 years, we created a highly resolved (10km2) map of historical oyster reef presence across its biogeographic range, including documenting abundant [...]
Historical dataset details the distribution, extent and form of lost Ostrea edulis reef ecosystems.
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Marine Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ocean ecosystems have been subjected to anthropogenic influences for centuries, but the scale of past ecosystem changes is often unknown. For centuries, the European flat oyster (Ostrea edulis), an ecosystem engineer providing biogenic reef habitats, was a culturally and economically significant source of food and trade. These reef habitats are now functionally extinct, and almost no memory of [...]
Natural selection is less efficient at species range edges
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Changing species distributions due to global change underscore a pressing need to better understand range limits. However, our knowledge of general determinants of range limits remains poor despite over a century of work. Theoretical models demonstrate that genetic drift should strengthen across environmental gradients. This can limit natural selection to the point where populations can no longer [...]
Opinion: Missing half the picture, focus on stony corals during bleaching events has left critical knowledge gaps in our understanding of reef-scale bleaching and recovery
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The behavioural costs of overcrowding for gregarious cave-dwelling bats
Published: 2023-11-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Bats are known for their gregarious social behaviour, often congregating in caves and underground habitats, where they play a pivotal role in providing various ecosystem services. Studying bat behaviour remains an underexplored aspect of bat ecology and conservation despite its ecological importance. 2. We explore the costs and impacts of overcrowding on bat social behaviour. This study [...]
The dispersal potential of endangered plants versus non-native garden escapees
Published: 2023-10-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Amidst global challenges like climate change, plant dispersal corridors are essential. In human-dominated landscapes, urban and rural green spaces are key dispersal avenues. Non-native plants are known to benefit from these, yet the potential benefits for endangered plants remain unclear. To address this question, I compared dispersal traits of endangered native plants with those of [...]