Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
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 [...]
Understanding the tripartite approach to Bayesian divergence time estimation
Published: 2020-04-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Placing evolutionary events in the context of geological time is a fundamental goal in paleobiology and macroevolution. In this article we describe the tripartite model used for Bayesian estimation of time calibrated phylogenetic trees. The model can be readily separated into its component models: the substitution model, the clock model and the tree model. We provide an overview of the most [...]
StableClim, continuous projections of climate stability from 21000 BP to 2100 CE at multiple spatial scales
Published: 2020-02-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Paleoclimatic data are used in eco-evolutionary models to improve knowledge of biogeographical processes that drive patterns of biodiversity through time, opening windows into past climate–biodiversity dynamics. Applying these models to harmonised simulations of past and future climatic change can strengthen forecasts of biodiversity change. StableClim provides continuous estimates of climate [...]
The Orchard Plot: Cultivating a Forest Plot for Use in Ecology, Evolution and Beyond
Published: 2019-12-29
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
‘Classic’ forest plots show the effect sizes from individual studies and the aggregate effect from a meta-analysis. However, in ecology and evolution meta-analyses routinely contain over 100 effect sizes, making the classic forest plot of limited use. We surveyed 102 meta-analyses in ecology and evolution, finding that only 11% use the classic forest plot. Instead, most used a ‘forest-like plot’, [...]
Experimenting with the past to improve environmental monitoring programs
Published: 2019-10-13
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Long-term monitoring programs are a fundamental part of both understanding system dynamics and informing management decisions. However, monitoring programs not always designed to consider statistical power, site selection, or the full costs and benefits of monitoring. Further, data from monitoring programs with different goals and protocols are now being combined for comparative analyses. Key [...]
Toward a Pluralistic Conception of Resilience
Published: 2019-06-28
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Computer Sciences, Dynamic Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Other Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability, Systems Biology
The concept of resilience occupies an increasingly prominent position within contemporary efforts to confront many of modernitys most pressing challenges, including global environmental change, famine, infrastructure, poverty, and terrorism, to name but a few. Received views of resilience span a broad conceptual and theoretical terrain, with a diverse range of application domains and settings. In [...]
On the importance of the megabiota to the functioning of the biosphere
Published: 2019-06-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A prominent signal of the Anthropocene is the extinction and population reduction of the megabiota – the largest animals and plants on the planet. However, we lack a predictive framework for the sensitivity of megabiota during times of rapid global change and how they impact the functioning of ecosystems and the biosphere. Here, we extend metabolic scaling theory and use global simulation models [...]
A protocol for using drones to assist monitoring of large breeding bird colonies
Published: 2019-04-28
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology
Drones are rapidly becoming part of environmental monitoring and management applications. They provide an opportunity to improve a number of activities related to monitoring population dynamics of aggregations of wildlife. Bird surveys using drones have attracted particular attention, with a range of potential metrics able to be derived from high resolution drone imagery. Whilst a number of [...]
A continental measure of urbanness predicts avian response to local urbanization
Published: 2019-03-26
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Understanding species-specific relationships with their environment is essential for ecology, biogeography, and conservation biology. Moreover, understanding how these relationships change with spatial scale is critical to mitigating potential threats to biodiversity. But methods which measure inter-specific variation in responses to environmental parameters, generalizable across multiple spatial [...]
Complexity revealed in the greening of the Arctic
Published: 2019-02-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
As the Arctic warms, vegetation is responding and satellite measures indicate widespread greening at high latitudes. This ‘greening of the Arctic’ is among the world’s most significant large-scale ecological responses to global climate change. However, a consensus is emerging that the underlying causes and future dynamics of so-called Arctic greening and browning trends are more complex, [...]
Monitoring large and complex wildlife aggregations with drones
Published: 2019-01-02
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
• Recent advances in drone technology have rapidly led to their use for monitoring and managing wildlife populations but a broad and generalised framework for their application to complex wildlife aggregations is still lacking • We present a generalised semi-automated approach where machine learning can map targets of interest in drone imagery, supported by predictive modelling for estimating [...]