Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biodiversity
An operational workflow for producing periodic estimates of species occupancy at large scales
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
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
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
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
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 [...]
GridDER: Grid Detection and Evaluation in R
Published: 2022-05-23
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: 2022-05-11
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: 2022-05-05
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 [...]
Integrating presence-only and presence-absence data to model changes in species geographic ranges: An example of yaguarundí in Latin America
Published: 2022-04-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Anthropogenic changes such as land use and climate change affect species’ geographic ranges, causing range shifts, contractions, or expansions. However, data on range dynamics are insufficient, heterogeneous, and spatially and temporally biased in most regions. Integrated species distribution models (IDMs) offer a solution as they can complement good quality presence-absence data with [...]
High compositional dissimilarity among small communities is decoupled from environmental variation
Published: 2022-04-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Communities composed of small populations are predicted to be strongly influenced by stochastic demographic events and, thus, less affected by environmental selection than those composed of large populations. However, this prediction has only been tested with computer simulations, simplified controlled experiments, and limited observational data. Here, using multiple datasets on fish abundance in [...]
Multi-population analysis reveals spatial consistency in drivers of population dynamics of a declining migratory bird
Published: 2022-04-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Population Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Survival Analysis, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Many migratory species are in decline across their geographical ranges. Single-population studies can provide important insights into drivers at a local scale, but effective conservation requires multi-population perspectives. This is challenging because relevant data are often hard to consolidate, and state-of-the-art analytical tools are typically tailored to specific datasets. We capitalized [...]
Simple methods for improving the communication of uncertainty in species’ temporal trends
Published: 2022-04-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Temporal trends in species occupancy or abundance are a fundamental source of information for ecology and conservation. Model-based uncertainty in these trends is often communicated as frequentist confidence or Bayesian credible intervals; however, these are often misinterpreted in various ways, even by scientists. Research from the science of information visualisation indicates that line [...]
Plant families exhibit unique geographic trends in C4 richness and cover
Published: 2022-04-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Numerous studies have analysed the relationship between C4 plant cover and climate. However, few have examined how different C4 taxa vary in their response to climate, or how environmental factors alter C4:C3 abundance. Here we investigate (a) how proportional C4 plant cover and richness (relative to C3) responds to changes in climate and local environmental factors, and (b) if this response is [...]
Hematological and Biochemical Reference Intervals of the Visayan Warty Pig in Negros Occidental, Philippines
Published: 2022-03-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Animal Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Physiology, Zoology
The Visayan warty pig is one of the endemic species of the Philippines that have been listed as "critically endangered." Conservation actions and efforts, such as health assessments, are being carried out to preserve the population. However, there is limited information about the normal hematological and biochemical profile of the species. The study presents reference intervals essential for [...]