Skip to main content

Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity

Causal inference and large-scale expert validation shed light on the drivers of SDM accuracy and variance

Rob James Boyd, Martin Harvey, David Roy, et al.

Published: 2022-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences

1. The literature is awash with studies purporting to show how various species and data characteristics affect the performances of Species Distribution Models (SDMs). Many of these studies follow a similar template: they fit SDMs for several species, or the same species using different datasets; assess the accuracy of those SDMs using skill statistics; and then identify correlates thereof. [...]

New Global Species Biodiversity: Soil soars, Ocean flounders

Robert Blakemore

Published: 2022-09-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology

Based on topographic field data, an argument is advanced that Soil houses ~2.1 x 10^24 taxa and supports >99.9% of global species biodiversity, mostly Bacteria or other microbes. Contradictory claims that Soil is home to only a quarter of biota while Ocean harbours 80-99% of Life on Earth are both dismissed. Earlier guesstimates of ~8.8 million taxa (~2.2 million or 25% marine), of 1-6 [...]

Realising the potential of real-time online monitoring for conservation culturomics

Thomas Frederick Johnson, Richard Cornford, Shawn Dove, et al.

Published: 2022-09-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Environmental monitoring is increasingly shifting towards a set of systems that describe changes in real-time. In ecology specifically, a series of challenges have prevented the roll-out of real-time monitoring for features such as biodiversity change or ecosystem service provision. Conservation culturomics, a field concerned with interactions between people and nature, is well-placed to [...]

Sampling strategy matters to accurately estimate response curves’ parameters in species distribution models

Manuele Bazzichetto, Jonathan Lenoir, Daniele Da Re, et al.

Published: 2022-08-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

Aim: Assessing how different sampling strategies affect the accuracy and precision of species response curves estimated by parametric Species Distribution Models. Major taxa studied: Virtual plant species. Location: Abruzzo (Italy). Time period: Timeless (simulated data). Methods: We simulated the occurrence of two virtual species with different ecology (generalist vs specialist) and [...]

The courage of hopelessness: a transformative change for conservation sciences

Marco Malavasi

Published: 2022-07-29
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.

Amphibian Specialist Group IUCN SSC

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

Matthias Grenié, Hugo Gruson

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

Brenna Forester, Tanya Lama

Published: 2022-07-14
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

Sofia Vamos, Cheng Li, Aboubakr Moradi, et al.

Published: 2022-07-05
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

Norma Forero, Renata L. Muylaert, Stephanie N. Seifert, et al.

Published: 2022-07-01
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

Rob James Boyd, Tom August, Robert Cooke, et al.

Published: 2022-06-23
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

Oliver C. Stringham, Jacob Maher, Charlotte Lassaline, et al.

Published: 2022-06-16
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

Diego Ellis-Soto, Melissa Chapman, Dexter H Locke

Published: 2022-06-09
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

Tadeu Siqueira, Charles Hawkins, Julian Olden, et al.

Published: 2022-05-30
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

Sanja Maria Hakala, Haruna Fujioka, Ornela De Gasperin, et al.

Published: 2022-05-27
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 [...]

search

You can search by:

  • Title
  • Keywords
  • Author Name
  • Author Affiliation