Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
A low-cost solution for documenting, tracking, and verifying cage-level animal husbandry tasks using wireless QR scanners and cloud-based spreadsheets
Published: 2022-02-03
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Animal care is a critical component underlying successful behavioral and cognition experiments. Technological solutions for documentation and verification of care can aid in monitoring that activities are completed according to standard operating procedures and ensure that no individuals are overlooked. Here, I summarize a low-cost, flexible, and easy to use system that I developed to document [...]
The role of non-English-language science in informing national biodiversity assessments
Published: 2022-01-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Communication, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Library and Information Science, Life Sciences, Publishing, Scholarly Publishing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Consulting the best available evidence is key to successful conservation decision-making. While much scientific evidence on conservation continues to be published in non-English languages, a poor understanding of how non-English languages science contributes to conservation decision-making is causing global assessments and studies to practically ignore non-English-language literature. By [...]
For the few, not the many: local economic conditions constrain the large-scale management of invasive mosquitoes
Published: 2022-01-06
Subjects: Economics, Entomology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Other Medicine and Health Sciences, Public Economics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Systems Biology
Invasive mosquitoes are an emerging ecological and sanitary issue. Many factors have been suggested as drivers or barriers to their control, still no study quantified their influence over mosquito management by local authorities, nor their interplay with local economic conditions. We assessed how multiple environmental, sanitary, and socio-economic factors affected the engagement of [...]
Direct Economic Inputs from Internationally Funded Science Projects to the Abaco Islands, The Bahamas
Published: 2021-12-06
Subjects: Communication, Environmental Studies, International and Intercultural Communication, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
International expenditures for scientific research are important for small island developing nations, especially for those local communities that directly support research activities. We used the Abaco Islands, The Bahamas, as a case study to quantify the direct monetary inputs to a local economy via internationally-funded scientific research. We found that over two years the external monetary [...]
Estimating the societal benefits from wildfire mitigation activities in a payments for watershed services program in Colorado
Published: 2021-11-24
Subjects: Economics, Other Economics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Payments for watershed services (PWS) programs are becoming a popular governance approach in the western United States (US) to fund forest management aimed at source water protection. In this paper we conduct a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of one of the first collaboratively funded PWS programs in the US, located in the municipal watersheds servicing Denver, Colorado. We combine wildfire modeling, [...]
The Emergence and Persistence of Payments for Watershed Services Programs in Mexico
Published: 2021-11-18
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Payments for watershed services programs (PWS) have become a prominent tool to protect ecosystems and hydrological services but little is known about where these innovative financing tools and governance systems emerge and persist. In 2008, the Mexican government started a program where they match funding from local partners to establish user-financed PWS programs, leading to the creation of 145 [...]
Perceived impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on protected area management and conservation outcomes in Mexico
Published: 2021-11-02
Subjects: Geography, Human Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Protected areas (PAs) are under immense pressure to safeguard much of the world’s remaining biodiversity and can be strained by unpredicted events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding the extent of the pandemic’s effect on PA management, activities, and conservation outcomes is critical for recovery and future planning to buffer against these types of events. We use survey and focus group [...]
Culture is Reducing Genetic Heritability and Superseding Genetic Adaptation
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Uchiyama, Spicer, and Muthukrishna reveal how group-structured cultural variation influences measurements of trait heritability. We argue that understanding culture’s influence on phenotypic heritability can clarify the impact of culture on genetic inheritance, which has implications for long-term gene-culture coevolution. Their analysis may provide guidance for testing our hypothesis that [...]
Mobbing in animals: a thorough review and proposed future directions
Published: 2021-10-26
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Communication, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Mobbing is an important anti-predator behavior where prey harass and attack a predator to lower the immediate and long-term risk posed by predators, warn others, and communicate about the predator’s threat. While this behavior has been of interest to humans since antiquity, and aspects of it have been well researched for the past 50 years, we still know little about its ecology and the [...]
A force competition of predator on urban ecosystem
Published: 2021-10-25
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Definitely the fact, is an undeniable impact of habitat change and fragmentation in the urban ecosystem take effect to species loss causes population decline into local extinction. The results that emerged from habitat selection in ecology in this case study may suggest possible opportunistic of population turnover are caused by behaviour adaptive in the life-history of predators. And provides [...]
The Invention of Fistfighting
Published: 2021-10-20
Subjects: Anthropology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
It has been hypothesized that key aspects of human male upper limb and facial morphology evolved through selective pressures related to fistfighting. Based on the primatological, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence, I argue these proposals are misguided. An important trend during recent hominin evolution was a decline in upper body strength and facial robusticity, coinciding in part with [...]
Why understanding stakeholder perspectives and emotions is important in upland woodland creation – a case study from Cumbria, UK
Published: 2021-10-15
Subjects: Community-based Research, Environmental Studies, Human Ecology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology
Upland regions in the United Kingdom (UK) are increasingly under consideration as potential areas for the creation of woodlands. This is driven by a combination of factors, including the aims of UK forestry and environmental policy to increase woodland cover, meeting international greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, agro-environment schemes in national and international policy, and an [...]
Impacts of woodland planting on nature-based recreational tourism in upland England – a case study
Published: 2021-10-06
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Upland landscapes provide important ecosystem services (ES) to society. One cultural ES - nature-based recreational tourism (NBR) - is a growing industry in upland regions that provides an important revenue to areas where other industries are often in decline. NBR tourism is a service that relies partly on the aesthetic appearance of the landscape. Changes in land management, such as increasing [...]
Indicators of Complexity and Over-complexification in Global Food Systems
Published: 2021-10-02
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Global food systems have increased in complexity significantly since the mid-20th century, through such innovations as mechanization, irrigation, genetic modification, and the globalization of supply chains. While complexification can be an effective problem-solving strategy, over-complexification can cause environmental degradation and lead systems to become increasingly dependent on external [...]
Make natures role visible to achieve the SDGs
Published: 2021-09-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Economics, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Central to the premise of the Sustainable Development Goals is the concept that the environment underpins the economic and social dimensions of development, yet the language and structure of the SDG framework are largely blind to these environment-development relationships beyond the "nature" Goals (14 and 15). As a result, ecosystem health continues to decline, development milestones lag, and [...]