Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
Potential effects of habitat fragmentation on wild animal welfare
Published: 2020-06-18
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
The fragmentation of habitat has occurred throughout the history of life on Earth, but has been accelerated and magnified in scale over the past few centuries as a result of human industrial development. Habitat fragmentation affects the welfare of some wild animals directly, through the often violent processes that bring about fragmentation and by reducing the distance between them and the [...]
SYSTEMATICS OF CALANDRINIA PILOSIUSCULA DC A.K.A. CALANDRINIA COMPRESSA SCHRAD. EX DC (MONTIACEAE–MONTIOIDEAE)
Published: 2020-05-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences
Calandrinia compressa Schrad. ex DC (Prodr. 3: 359. 1828) is the name currently widely applied to a polymorphic annual species of Calandrinia sect. Calandrinia endemic to the Chilean Floristic Region. A total of ten validly published heterotypic names plus six horticultural designations (and orthographic variants thereof) have been considered at some point as taxonomically the same as C. [...]
A guide to using the Internet to monitor and quantify the wildlife trade
Published: 2020-05-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
The unrivalled growth in e-commerce of animals and plants presents an unprecedented opportunity to monitor wildlife trade to inform conservation, biosecurity, and law enforcement. Using the Internet to quantify the scale of the wildlife trade (volume, frequency) is a relatively recent and rapidly developing approach, which currently lacks an accessible framework for locating relevant websites and [...]
Associations between habitat quality and body size in the Carpathian land snail Vestia turgida: species distribution model selection and assessment of performance.
Published: 2020-05-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Associations between habitat quality and body size in the Carpathian land snail Vestia turgida: species distribution model selection and assessment of performance. Tytar V., Baidashnikov O. – Species distribution models (SDMs) are generally thought to be good indicators of habitat suitability, and thus of species’ performance, consequently SDMs can be validated by checking whether the areas [...]
Why spatial scale matters in predicting synchrony of ecological disruption
Published: 2020-05-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Arising from: C. Trisos et al. Nature 580, 496–501, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2189-9 (2020). ABSTRACT The fundamental assumption behind this provocative study (Trisos et al. 2020) is that current and future climatic tolerance limits for a species can be inferred from the last 170 years of climate records within its current distribution. Using this approach, the authors project the [...]
Trophic cascades and connectivity in coastal benthic marine ecosystems: a meta-analysis of experimental and observational research
Published: 2020-05-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Predators often exert top-down control on lower trophic levels, such that their removal or addition can trigger trophic cascades. Despite coastal ecosystems containing well known trophic cascades, the abiotic and biotic factors governing the occurrence and strength of these cascades are still unclear. We worked to explain the variability of trophic cascades in benthic marine ecosystems by [...]
Financial and institutional support are important for large-scale kelp forest restoration
Published: 2020-04-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Kelps form extensive underwater forests that underpin valuable ecosystem goods and services in temperate and polar rocky coastlines worldwide. Stressors such as ocean warming and pollution are causing regional declines of kelp forests and their associated services worldwide. Kelp forest restoration is becoming a prominent management intervention, but we have little understanding of what drives [...]
[Final version available] Explainable Artificial Intelligence enhances the ecological interpretability of black-box species distribution models
Published: 2020-04-17
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biodiversity, Computer Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used in ecology, biogeography and conservation biology to estimate relationships between environmental variables and species occurrence data and make predictions of how their distributions vary in space and time. During the past two decades, the field has increasingly made use of machine learning approaches for constructing and validating SDMs. Model [...]
The genomic revolution and species delimitation in birds (and other organisms): gene flow matters, but what about other evolutionary forces?
Published: 2020-04-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences
Given the notion that species are population-level lineages and the availability of genomic data to identify separately evolving populations, researchers usually establish species limits based on gene flow or lack thereof. A strict focus on gene flow as the main –or only– criterion to delimit species involves two main complications in practice. First, approaches often used to apply this criterion [...]
The sixth R: Revitalizing the natural phosphorus pump
Published: 2020-03-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Humans and natural systems face three pressing concerns: the loss of large animal biodiversity, eutrophication of many aquatic systems, and the need to better recycle phosphorus. Here we propose a mechanism to help alleviate these problems. Some have hypothesized that we are approaching “peak phosphorus,” where phosphorus may become more expensive as it becomes rarer, thus endangering the green [...]
Physiological condition of amphibians exposed to historical industrial pollution in a Brazilian biodiversity hotspot
Published: 2020-03-06
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology
Industrial pollution is a significant global threat to biodiversity, but its consequences on rainforest ecosystems remains poorly understood. Amphibians are especially susceptible to pollutants released on natural environments due to their aquatic-terrestrial life cycle. Here, we explored the effects of severe historical air, water and soil industrial pollution of Cubatão Industrial Complex (São [...]
Toward Reliable Biodiversity Dataset References
Published: 2020-01-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
No systematic approach has yet been adopted to reliably reference and provide access to digital biodiversity datasets. Based on accumulated evidence, we argue that location-based identifiers such as URLs are not sufficient to ensure long-term data access. We introduce a method that uses dedicated data observatories to evaluate long-term URL reliability. From March 2019 through May 2020, we took [...]
Effects of ambient climate and three different warming treatments on fruit production in an alpine meadow community
Published: 2019-12-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Climate change is already having a major impact on alpine and arctic regions, and inter-annual variations in temperature are likely to increase. In a four-year study focusing on fruit production by an alpine plant community in northern Sweden, we applied three different warming regimes over the years. Treatments consisted of (a) a static level of warming with open-top chambers (OTC), (b) press [...]
The hidden value of trees: quantifying the ecosystem services of tree lineages and their major threats across the contiguous US
Published: 2019-11-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
Trees provide critical contributions to human well-being. They sequester and store greenhouse gasses, filter air pollutants, provide wood, food, and other products, among other benefits. These benefits are threatened by climate change, fires, pests and pathogens. To quantify the current value of the flow of ecosystem services from US trees, and the potential threats they face, we combine [...]
Thermal ecology or interspecific competition: what drives the warm and cold distribution limits of mountain ectotherms?
Published: 2019-10-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Current climate change-forced local extinctions of ectotherms in their warmer distribution limits have been linked to a reduction in their activity budgets by excess of heat. However, warmer distribution limits of species may be determined by biotic interactions as well. We aimed to understand the role of thermal activity budgets as drivers of the warmer distribution limit of cold-adapted [...]