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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity

Gardens as drivers of native plant dispersal and conservation

Ingmar R. Staude

Published: 2023-08-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

1. Gardens hold untapped potential for participatory biodiversity conservation. Conservation gardening has recently emerged as a way to foster declining native plant species in urban and rural green spaces. But the impact of cultivating these species on population trends in the broader landscape remains underexplored. 2. Here, I study the effects of cultivating herbaceous native plants on [...]

Relative abundance distributions reveal constraints on tetrapod community diversity

Neil Brocklehurst, Bethany Allen, Emma M Dunne

Published: 2023-08-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Evolution

Previous efforts to understand the pace of species diversification through time have disagreed over whether species diversity is unbounded or limited by a carrying capacity. Tetrapods (limbed vertebrates) have frequently been employed as a case-study in examinations of this issue, with studies of diversity being used to support both sides. Here, we examine the shape of relative abundance [...]

Assessing risk of ecosystem collapse in a changing climate

Jessica A. Rowland, Emily Nicholson, Jose-Rafael Ferrer-Paris, et al.

Published: 2023-08-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences

Climate change has pervasive impacts on Earth’s ecosystems, but the diversity and complexity of ecosystems makes estimating the severity of impacts and the resulting risk of collapse difficult. In this perspective, we conceptualise the challenge of understanding how climate change alters ecosystems, and how to reliably measure those changes in ecosystem risk assessments, focussing on the IUCN Red [...]

STRyper: a macOS application for microsatellite genotyping and chromatogram management

Jean Peccoud

Published: 2023-07-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Molecular Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Microsatellite markers analyzed by capillary sequencing remain useful tools for rapid genotyping and low-cost studies. This contrasts with the lack of a free application to analyze chromatograms for microsatellite genotyping that is not restricted to human genotyping. To fill this gap, I have developed STRyper, a macOS application whose source code is published under the General Public License. [...]

The need of decoding life for taking care of biodiversity and the sustainable use of nature in the Anthropocene - a Faroese perspective

Svein-Ole Mikalsen, Jari í Hjøllum, Ian Salter, et al.

Published: 2023-07-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences

Biodiversity is under pressure, mainly due to human activities and climate change. At the international policy level, it is now recognised that genetic diversity is an important part of biodiversity. The availability of high-quality reference genomes gives the best basis for using genetics and genetic diversity towards the global aims of (i) protection of species, biodiversity, and nature, and [...]

How does dispersal shape the genetic patterns of animal populations in European cities? A simulation approach

Paul Savary, Cécile Tannier, Jean-Christophe Foltête, et al.

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

Mattia De Vivo

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

Joseph Lambert, Yujie Niu, Kun Shi, et al.

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

Shane DuBay, Brian C Weeks, Pamela E Davis-Kean, et al.

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

Jakub W. Bubnicki, Ben Norton, Steven J. Baskauf, et al.

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

Paul Savary, Jean-Philippe Lessard, Pedro R. Peres-Neto

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

Mariana García Criado, Isla H. Myers-Smith, Anne D. Bjorkman, et al.

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

Mara Elena Heinrichs, Gonçalo J Piedade, Ovidiu Popa, et al.

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

Charudutt Mishra, Ranjini Murali, Bayarjargal Agvaantseren, et al.

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

Manuele Bazzichetto, Marta Gaia Sperandii, Caterina Penone, et al.

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 [...]

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