Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
The courage of hopelessness: a transformative change for conservation sciences
Published: 2022-07-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
As the twenty-first century unfolds, the human-driven decline of life on Earth is of greater concern and, despite tremendous growth in the volume of conservation science and many local successes, shows no clear signs of improvement. As a matter of fact, the reversal of nature’s ongoing decline is only possible with urgent “transformative change” However, no transformative changes are viable [...]
Draft for Open Consultation. The Amphibian Conservation Action Plan (ACAP): A status review and roadmap for global amphibian conservation.
Published: 2022-07-18
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Other Animal Sciences
As the most threatened vertebrate class on earth, amphibians are at the forefront of the biodiversity crisis, with the start of global amphibian declines and extinctions dating back several decades now. The Amphibian Conservation Action Plan (ACAP), the first taxonomic class-level plan of its kind, was first published in 2007 and then updated as a digital resource in 2015, with the goal of acting [...]
fundiversity: a modular R package to compute functional diversity indices
Published: 2022-07-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
1. Functional diversity is widely used and widespread. However, the main package used to compute functional diversity indices FD is not flexible and not adapted to the volume of data used in modern ecological analyses. 2. We here present fundiversity, an R package that eases the computation of classical functional diversity indices. It leverages parallelization and memoization (caching results [...]
The role of genomics in the future of Endangered Species Act decision-making
Published: 2022-07-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) provides a framework for the protection and recovery of threatened and endangered species and their habitats in the face of anthropogenic threats. Genetic information has played a role in decision-making under the ESA for decades, most commonly informing taxonomy and the designation of distinct population segments, though detection of inbreeding also played [...]
High tolerance to zinc but no evidence for local adaptation in the aquatic plant Lemna minor
Published: 2022-07-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Duckweeds are a widely distributed and economically important aquatic plant family that have high potential for phytoremediation of polluted water bodies. We collected four ecotypes of the common duckweed (Lemna minor) from the four corners of Switzerland and assessed how their home vs. away environments influenced their growth. Additionally, we investigated their response to a metal pollutant [...]
The coevolutionary mosaic of bat betacoronavirus emergence risk
Published: 2022-07-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Biotechnology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
Pathogen evolution is one of the least predictable components of disease emergence, particularly in nature. Here, building on principles established by the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution, we develop a quantitative, spatially-explicit framework for mapping the evolutionary risk of viral emergence. Driven by interest in diseases like SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, we examine the global [...]
An operational workflow for producing periodic estimates of species occupancy at large scales
Published: 2022-06-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Policy makers require high-level summaries of biodiversity change. However, deriving such summaries from raw biodiversity data is a complex process involving several intermediary stages. In this paper, we describe a workflow for generating annual estimates of species’ occupancy at national scales from raw species occurrence data, which can be used to construct a range of policy-relevant [...]
The dark web trades wildlife, but mostly for use as drugs
Published: 2022-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Contemporary wildlife trade is massively facilitated by the Internet. By design, the dark web is one layer of the Internet that is difficult to monitor and lacks thorough investigation. Here, we accessed a comprehensive database of dark web marketplaces to search across c. 2 million dark web advertisements over 5 years using c. 7k wildlife trade-related search terms. We found 153 species traded [...]
Uneven biodiversity sampling across redlined urban areas in the United States
Published: 2022-06-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Demography, Population, and Ecology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Inequality and Stratification, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology, Urban Studies and Planning
Citizen science data has rapidly gained influence in urban ecology and conservation planning, but with limited understanding of how such data reflects social, economic, and political conditions and legacies. Understanding patterns of sampling bias across socioeconomic gradients is critical to accurately map and understand biodiversity patterns, and to generating representative and just [...]
Temporal variability declines with increasing trophic levels and spatial scales in freshwater ecosystems
Published: 2022-05-31
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The temporal variability of ecological properties tends to decrease with spatial scale and levels of biological organization, but how does it propagate across trophic levels? We compiled metacommunity time-series datasets spanning basal resources to top predators from 355 freshwater sites across three continents. Temporal variability in abundance decreased from producers to tertiary consumers [...]
Evolution and impact of socially transferred materials
Published: 2022-05-28
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Physiology, Systems Biology
Since the dawn of life, transfers of metabolized material between individuals have led to great innovations of evolution. When metabolized material is transferred from one individual’s body to another (as with sperm, eggs, milk, symbionts), secondary manipulative molecules that induce a physiological response in the receiver are often transferred along with the primary cargo. The bioactive and [...]
GridDER: Grid Detection and Evaluation in R
Published: 2022-05-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Observations and collections of organisms form the basis of our understanding of Earth’s biodiversity and are an indispensable resource for global change studies. Geographic information is key, serving as the link between organisms and the environments they reside in. However, the geographic information associated with these records is often inaccurate, thus limiting their efficacy for research. [...]
Animating the carbon cycle through trophic rewilding could provide highly effective natural climate solutions
Published: 2022-05-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Natural climate solutions are being advanced as cost-effective and safe ways to achieve net-zero emissions by protecting and enhancing carbon capture and storage in plants, and in soils and sediments in terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Current thinking holds that these solutions have the added benefit of protecting habitats and landscapes to restore and conserve animal species diversity. [...]
Macroecological processes drive spiritual ecosystem services obtained from giant trees
Published: 2022-05-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology, Sociology of Religion
Giant trees that have come to have their own unique identities are often named by local people and can inspire a sense of awe and become objects of faith. Although these giant trees provide various kinds of spiritual ecosystem services that are beneficial to the spiritual well-being of the human society, the drivers of these services remain unclear. Using structural equation modeling with 38,994 [...]
Fine-scale spatial distribution of biodiversity citizen science in a natural area depends on area accessibility and differs from other recreational area use
Published: 2022-05-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Opportunistic citizen science produces large amounts of primary biodiversity data but is underutilized in the conservation and management of protected areas despite these areas’ status as citizen science hotspots. Application of these data may be limited by the challenge of understanding sampling patterns associated with opportunistic data at a scale relevant to local area management. An [...]