Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Periodic monitoring of vampire bats and rabies: a new framework for animal restoration projects in the Neotropics
Published: 2020-11-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Life Sciences
Nowadays, restoration project might lead to increased public engagement and enthusiasm for biodiversity and is receiving increased media attention in major newspapers, TED talks and the scientific literature. However, empirical research on restoration project is rare, fragmented, and geographically biased and long-term studies that monitor indirect and unexpected effects are needed to support [...]
Environmental conditions promote local segregation, but functional distinctiveness allow aggregation of catfishes in the Amazonian estuary
Published: 2020-10-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Cooccurrence patterns of species can appear through niche-related processes such as (i) environmental filtering matching specific sets of traits to a given environment, and (ii) limiting similarity selecting divergent functional traits to reduce niche overlap. Locally, both processes should act together to shape the distribution of species. We evaluated the importance of environmental variables [...]
Rock glaciers and related cold rocky landforms: overlooked climate refugia for mountain biodiversity
Published: 2020-10-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Mountains are global biodiversity hotspots where cold environments and their associated ecological communities are predicted to be threatened by climate warming. Considerable research attention has been devoted to understanding the ecological effects of alpine glacier and snowfield recession. However, much less attention has been given to identifying climate refugia in mountain ecosystems where [...]
Reducing land use-induced spillover risk by fostering landscape immunity: policy priorities for conservation practitioners
Published: 2020-10-15
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Immunopathology, International and Area Studies, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Parasitology, Population Biology, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Science and Technology Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Systems Biology
Anthropogenic land use change is the major driver of zoonotic pathogen spillover from wildlife to humans. In response to the global spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (the agent of COVID-19 disease), there have been renewed calls for landscape conservation as a disease preventive measure. While protected areas are a vital conservation tool for wildlands, more than 50% of habitable land is now [...]
Participatory mapping of aquatic invasive species: a demonstration in a coastal lagoon
Published: 2020-10-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Aquatic Invasive species (AIS) are a growing driver of change across marine and freshwater ecosystems but spatially-explicit information is seldom available for supporting management actions and decision making. Here we conceived and tested a new participatory method to map the distribution of three invasive species (Callinectes sapidus, Procambarus clarkii and Oreochromis niloticus) in the [...]
Insights from regional and short-term biodiversity monitoring datasets are valuable. A Reply to Daskalova et al. 2020 EcoEvoRxiv doi:10.32942/osf.io/cg3zs
Published: 2020-10-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Reports of major losses in biodiversity have stimulated an increasing interest in temporal population changes, particularly in insects, which had received little attention in the past. Existing long-term datasets are often limited to a small number of study sites, few points in time, a narrow range of land-use intensities and only some taxonomic groups, or they lack standardized sampling. While [...]
Accounting for year effects and sampling error in temporal analyses of population and biodiversity change - Response to Seibold et al. 2019 “Arthropod decline in grasslands and forests is associated with landscape-level drivers”
Published: 2020-10-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
An accumulating number of studies are reporting severe biomass, abundance and/or species richness declines of insects (Hallmann et al., 2017; Lister & Garcia, 2018; Seibold et al., 2019; Sánchez-Bayo & Wyckhuys, 2019). Collectively these studies aim to quantify the net change in invertebrate populations and/or community composition over time and to establish whether such changes can be [...]
Understanding biological resilience, from genes to ecosystems
Published: 2020-10-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The natural world is under unprecedented and accelerating pressure. Much work on understanding resilience to local and global environmental change has, so far, focussed on ecosystems. However, understanding a system’s behaviour requires knowledge of its component parts and their interactions. Here we present a framework for understanding ‘biological resilience’, or the processes that enable [...]
Synergistic impacts of anthropogenic fires and aridity on plant diversity in the Western Ghats: Implications for management of ancient social-ecological systems
Published: 2020-10-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Identifying the impacts of anthropogenic fires on biodiversity is imperative for human-influenced tropical rainforests because: i) these ecosystems have been transformed by human-induced fires for millennia; and ii) their effective management is essential for protecting the world’s terrestrial biodiversity in the face of global environmental change. While several short-term studies elucidate the [...]
A call to action: Understanding land use-induced zoonotic spillover to protect environmental, animal, and human health
Published: 2020-09-25
Subjects: Animal Diseases, Biodiversity, Biology, Diseases, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Parasitic Diseases, Public Health, Systems Biology, Veterinary Medicine
The rapid, global spread and human health impacts of SARS-CoV-2, the agent of COVID-19 disease, demonstrates humanity’s vulnerability to zoonotic disease pandemics. Although anthropogenic land use change is known to be the major driver of zoonotic pathogen spillover from wildlife to human populations, the scientific underpinnings of land use-induced zoonotic spillover have rarely been [...]
Cushion plants act as facilitators for soil microarthropods in high alpine Sweden
Published: 2020-09-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Cushion plants can have positive impacts on plant richness in severe environments and possibly across trophic levels on arthropods, an under-studied topic. 2. This study examined whether soil communities under cushions of Silene acaulis and Diapensia lapponica have higher richness and abundance of soil microarthropods (Acari, Collembola) than adjacent non-cushion vegetation; and whether [...]
Pathways linking biodiversity to human health: A conceptual framework
Published: 2020-09-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, Geography, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Other Psychology, Psychology, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Biodiversity is a cornerstone of human health and well-being. However, while evidence of the contributions of nature to human health is rapidly building, research into how biodiversity relates to human health remains limited in important respects. In particular, a better mechanistic understanding of the range of pathways through which biodiversity can influence human health is needed. These [...]
Rumicastrum Ulbrich (Montiaceae): a beautiful name for the Australian calandrinias
Published: 2020-09-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
For more than 30 years, Montiaceae specialists have agreed that Australian species classified in Calandrinia Kunth pertain to a distinct and divergent lineage whose oldest validly published name is Rumicastrum Ulbrich. In 1998, more than half of accepted species were transferred erroneously to a new genus, Parakeelya Hershk. However, taxonomists and databases have continued to classify the [...]
Püllomen: an ethnoecological perspective of the Mapuche protector spirit insect
Published: 2020-09-17
Subjects: Anthropology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Anthropology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Biodiversity plays an important role in cultural worldviews, influencing myths, stories, and spiritual beliefs of indigenous peoples. This short review explores an ecological phenomenon that may have influenced and contributed to the development of the Mapuche good spirit insect (Püllomen), which represents the spirit of someone who passed away and comes back to the world of the living providing [...]
BERTERO’S GHOST REVISITED: NEW TYPIFICATIONS OF TALINUM LINARIA COLLA AND CALANDRINIA GAUDICHAUDII BARNÉOUD (= CALANDRINIA PILOSIUSCULA DC; MONTIACEAE)
Published: 2020-09-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
In a revision of the systematics of Calandrinia pilosiuscula DC (including Calandrinia compressa Schrad. ex DC; Montiaceae), Hershkovitz recognized a total of ten validly named synonyms, including Calandrinia gaudichaudii Barnéoud and Talinum linaria Colla. He concluded that these two names were homotypic, both protologs citing a Bertero collection from Valparaiso, which Hershkovitz inferred to [...]