Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Pest Management Attitude scale: a tool for measuring consensus between experts and practitioners in invasion biology
Published: 2023-11-17
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Anthropology, Other Psychology, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Systems Biology
Quantifying attitudes towards invasive alien species (IAS) is fundamental to understand the extent to which conservation scientists agree and can collaborate in their management. We tested the Pest Management Scale (PMS), originally invented to quantify attitudes towards invasive alien mammals in New Zealand, as a tool to quantify broader attitudes towards IAS among bioinvasion experts in [...]
Urban heat stress and perceived health impacts in major cities of Bangladesh
Published: 2023-11-12
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Urban heatwaves are a growing concern, especially in South Asian countries grappling with rapid urbanization and limited resources. While prior studies focused on the biophysical aspects of urban heat islands in this region, there is limited evidence of people’s understanding of urban heat stress and its health consequences. This study aimed to investigate the perceived urban heat risk and [...]
Decomposing social environment effects on eco-evolutionary dynamics: from density regulation to frequency-dependent selection
Published: 2023-11-08
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The density and frequencies of interacting phenotypes create a type of environment which affects both phenotypic selection and population growth. Fluctuations in population density create temporal variation in population mean fitness, driving population dynamics, while fluctuations in phenotypic frequencies create variation in the relative fitness of phenotypes through frequency-dependent [...]
Ratio versus difference optimization in human behavior
Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Models of optimization have played an important role in the fields of evolution as well as economics. In the classical models of optimization, some tend to maximize the ratio of returns to investment and others tend to maximize the net benefit or the difference between the two. Clarity in the contextual appropriateness of the ratio model versus difference model came very recently. This clarity [...]
Global research priorities for historical ecology to inform conservation
Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Historical ecology draws on a broad range of information sources and methods to provide insight into ecological and social change, especially over the past ~12,000 years. While its results are often relevant to conservation and restoration, insights from its diverse disciplines, environments, and geographies have frequently remained siloed or underrepresented, restricting their full potential. [...]
Impacts of exposure to UV radiation and an agricultural pollutant on morphology and behaviour of tadpoles (Limnodynastes tasmaniensis)
Published: 2023-10-24
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Amphibians are the most threatened vertebrate class globally, with many species at risk of extinction. Multiple factors have been implicated in the global decline of amphibian populations, and it has been hypothesised that interactions between these stressors may be responsible for such rapid declines. Increased ultraviolet (UV) radiation as a result of ozone depletion has been identified as one [...]
Mobilising central bank digital currency to bend the curve of biodiversity loss
Published: 2023-10-22
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Humanity is at a critical juncture. Despite our efforts to set targets and goals, biodiversity and climate are both changing rapidly, pushing us towards a biosphere our species has not known. To solve this problem one view is that we need transformational change of the economic paradigm, but that might be more an ideal than pragmatic. A new idea could be to take inspiration from recent [...]
Measuring the 3-30-300 Rule to Help Cities Meet Nature Access Thresholds
Published: 2023-07-03
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Epidemiology, Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The 3-30-300 rule offers benchmarks for cities to promote equitable nature access. It dictates that individuals should see three trees from their dwelling, have 30% tree canopy in their neighborhood, and live within 300 meters of a high-quality green space. Implementing this demands thorough measurement, monitoring, and evaluation methods. Seven data and processes exist to assess these [...]
Evolutionary parsimony: an equilibrium refinement that sharply constrains the space of outcomes in games with multiple equilibria
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Evolutionary game theory loses much of its predictive power in games with multiple equilibria. For such games, this paper introduces a simple and general refinement principle, grounded in evolutionary dynamics, that sharply narrows the set of possible outcomes. Rather than designing strategies from scratch, evolution shapes them gradually through the accumulation of adaptive mutations, the vast [...]
Light wavelength and pulsing frequency affect avoidance responses of Canada geese
Published: 2023-05-25
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Collisions between birds and aircraft cause bird mortality, economic damage, and aviation safety hazards. One proposed solution to increasing the distance at which birds detect and move away from an approaching aircraft, ultimately mitigating the probability of collision, is through onboard lighting systems. Lights in vehicles have been shown to lead to earlier reactions in some bird species but [...]
Survival of the luckiest
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Opposite dynamics are behind natural selection and sexual selection. While the fittest survives in natural selection, the survivor will most likely be the luckiest when both dynamics are combined. As a result, chance has a greater impact on evolution.
Evidence for ancestral olfactory sensitivity but not discrimination across two living elephant species
Published: 2023-04-25
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
While African savanna and Asian elephants split between 4.2-9 MYA, they are often regarded as one united group, ‘elephants,’ even in the scientific literature. This is concerning, as while both are keystone species in their respective habitats, each face different environmental pressures and have rarely been compared experimentally. Savanna elephants must locate resources that vary spatially and [...]
Nature exposure and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: A Navigation Guide systematic review with meta-analysis
Published: 2023-02-18
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Previous reviews concluded that nature contact was an important coping strategy against poor mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the quality of evidence in these reviews was not sufficiently documented in terms of the risk of bias in reviewed studies. We attempted to fill this gap with a Navigation Guide systematic review and meta-analyses on the associations between nature [...]
Disentangling human nature: Anthropological reflections on evolution, zoonoses and ethnographic investigations
Published: 2023-02-12
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Human nature is a puzzling matter that must be analysed through a holistic lens. In this commentary, I foray into anthropology's biosocial dimensions to underscore that human relations span from microorganisms to global commodities. I argue that the future of social-cultural anthropology depends on the integration of evolutionary theory for its advancement. Ultimately, since the likelihood of [...]
More Than Half of Statistically Significant Research Findings in the Environmental Sciences are Actually Not
Published: 2023-01-26
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Researchers have incentives to search for and selectively report findings that appear to be statistically significant and/or conform to prior beliefs. Such selective reporting practices, including p-hacking and publication bias, can lead to a distorted set of results being published, potentially undermining the process of knowledge accumulation and evidence-based decision making. We take stock of [...]