Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Oropendola nest predation and rodent consumption by the black-capped capuchin (Sapajus apella) in the Manu Biosphere Reserve, Peru
Published: 2021-03-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Neotropical primate Sapajus apella (Linnaeus, 1758), the black-capped capuchin monkey, is widely distributed across the Amazon basin (Boubli et al., 2020). Capuchins are generalist platyrrhines, occurring in most tropical forest types, where they forage opportunistically (Sabbatini et al., 2008; Lynch Alfaro et al., 2012; Boubli et al., 2020). They exploit a diverse variety of food sources, [...]
Global maps of soil temperature
Published: 2021-03-21
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids thus fail to reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions are controlled and most terrestrial species reside. Here we provide global maps of soil [...]
Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model
Published: 2021-03-13
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biological Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Many researchers assume that until 10-12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands composed mostly of kin. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challenging this model and propose an alternative, the [...]
Phyloreferences: Tree-Native, Reproducible, and Machine-Interpretable Taxon Concepts
Published: 2021-03-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Software Engineering
Evolutionary and organismal biology have become inundated with data. At the same rate, we are experiencing a surge in broader evolutionary and ecological syntheses for which tree-thinking is the staple for a variety of post-tree analyses. To fully take advantage of this wealth of data to discover and understand large-scale evolutionary and ecological patterns, computational data integration, i.e. [...]
Students of color speak on racial equity in environmental sustainability
Published: 2020-12-17
Subjects: Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Race and Ethnicity, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology, Sustainability
This is a preprint of an article published in Nature Sustainability. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00759-7. Racial and ethnic diversity in environmental sustainability advances social equity and innovation solving social-ecological crises. Yet, Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) remain underrepresented in sustainability [...]
ausplotsR: An R package for rapid extraction and analysis of vegetation and soil data collected by Australia’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Published: 2020-12-15
Subjects: Biostatistics, Botany, Life Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Statistics and Probability
The Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), Australia’s national land ecosystem monitoring program, measures critical environmental attributes from local to continental scale and generates quality data for research and land management. Since 2011, TERN has performed standardised field surveys and sampling across a national plot network. At each plot, TERN records vegetation structure, [...]
Phylogenetic multilevel meta-analysis: A simulation study on the importance of modeling the phylogeny
Published: 2020-11-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
1. Meta-analyses in ecology and evolution require special attention due to certain study characteristics in these fields. First, the primary articles in these fields usually report results that are observed from studies conducted with different species, and the phylogeny among the species violates the independence assumption. Second, articles frequently allow the computation of multiple effect [...]
Motif: an open-source R tool for pattern-based spatial analysis
Published: 2020-10-17
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
*Context* Pattern-based spatial analysis provides methods to describe and quantitatively compare spatial patterns for categorical raster datasets. It allows for spatial search, change detection, and clustering of areas with similar patterns. *Objectives* We developed an R package **motif** as a set of open-source tools for pattern-based spatial analysis. *Methods* This package provides [...]
Synergistic impacts of anthropogenic fires and aridity on plant diversity in the Western Ghats: Implications for management of ancient social-ecological systems
Published: 2020-10-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Identifying the impacts of anthropogenic fires on biodiversity is imperative for human-influenced tropical rainforests because: i) these ecosystems have been transformed by human-induced fires for millennia; and ii) their effective management is essential for protecting the world’s terrestrial biodiversity in the face of global environmental change. While several short-term studies elucidate the [...]
Recent advances of quantitative modeling to support invasive species eradication on islands
Published: 2020-09-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The eradication of invasive species from islands is an important part of managing these ecologically unique and at-risk regions. Island eradications are complex projects and mathematical models play an important role in supporting efficient and transparent decision-making. In this review we cover the past applications of modelling to island eradications, which range from large-scale [...]
Indigenous Conservation Practices Are Not a Monolith: Western cultural biases and a lack of engagement with Indigenous experts undermine studies of land stewardship
Published: 2020-07-24
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Commentary On: Oswald, W. W., Foster, D. R., Shuman, B. N., Chilton, E. S., Doucette, D. L., Duranleau, D. L. Conservation implications of limited Native American impacts in pre-contact New England. Nature Sustainability https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0466-0
FIRED (Fire Events Delineation): An open, flexible algorithm & database of US fire events derived from the MODIS burned area product (2001-19)
Published: 2020-06-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Harnessing the fire data revolution, i.e., the abundance of information from satellites, government records, social media, and human health sources, now requires complex and challenging data integration approaches. Defining fire events is key to that effort. In order to understand the spatial and temporal characteristics of fire, or the classic fire regime concept, we need to critically define [...]
Ten simple rules for building an anti-racist lab
Published: 2020-06-18
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Demographics of the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce and student body in the U.S. and Europe continue to show severe underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). Among the documented causes of the persistent lack of diversity in STEM include bias, discrimination, and harassment of members of underrepresented minority groups (URMs). These [...]
[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 [...]
What we can learn from the parallels between the COVID-19 and the future climate change crises
Published: 2020-04-11
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The ongoing COVID-19 outbreak pandemic is now a global crisis. It has caused 1.6+ million confirmed cases and 100 000+ deaths at the time of writing and triggered unprecedented preventative measures that have put a substantial portion of the global population under confinement, imposed isolation, and established ‘social distancing’ as a new global behavioral norm. The COVID-19 crisis has affected [...]