Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Male age alone predicts paternity success under sperm competition when effects of age and past mating effort are experimentally separated
Published: 2021-05-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Older males often perform poorly under post-copulatory sexual selection. It is unclear, however, whether reproductive senescence is due to male age itself or the accumulated costs of the higher lifetime mating effort that is usually associated with male age. To date, very few studies have accounted for male mating history when testing for the effect of male age on sperm traits, and none test how [...]
Methods for testing publication bias in ecological and evolutionary meta-analyses
Published: 2021-04-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Publication bias threatens the validity of quantitative evidence from meta-analyses as it results in some findings being overrepresented in meta-analytic datasets because they are published more frequently or sooner (e.g., ‘positive’ results). Unfortunately, methods to test for the presence of publication bias, or assess its impact on meta-analytic results, are unsuitable for datasets with [...]
Temporal Change Detection Analysis of Monroe County, NY tree cover from 2009 to 2017
Published: 2021-03-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Forests provide many ecosystem services which are enjoyed by nearby residing communities. This includes pollution and flood mitigation, carbon sequestration, oxygen production, food, fuel, education, recreation, and aesthetics. These ecosystem services also come from urban and suburban forests. Urban ecosystems, specifically urban green spaces services have been noted to improve human health [...]
Phyloreferences: Tree-Native, Reproducible, and Machine-Interpretable Taxon Concepts
Published: 2021-03-06
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. [...]
Evidence of paternal effects on telomere length increases in early-life
Published: 2021-03-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Offspring of older parents in many species display decreased longevity, a faster ageing rate and lower fecundity than offspring born to younger parents. Biomarkers, such as telomeres, that tend to shorten as individual age, may provide insight into the mechanisms of parental age effects. Parental age could determine telomere length either through inheritance of shortened telomeres or through [...]
An assessment of statistical methods for non-independent data in ecological meta-analyses: Comment
Published: 2021-02-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Recently, Song et al. (2020) conducted a simulation study using different methods to deal with non-independence resulting from effect sizes originating from the same paper – a common occurrence in ecological meta-analyses. The main methods that were of interest in their simulations were: 1) a standard random-effects model used in combination with a weighted average effect size for each paper [...]
A Roadmap Toward Predicting Species Interaction Networks (Across Space and Time)
Published: 2021-02-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Networks of species interactions underpin numerous ecosystem processes, but comprehensively sampling these interactions is difficult. Interactions intrinsically vary across space and time, and given the number of species that compose ecological communities, it can be tough to distinguish between a true negative (where two species never interact) from a false negative (where two species have not [...]
Habitat shapes diversity of gut microbiomes in a wild population of blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus)
Published: 2021-02-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Microbiome constitutes and important axis of individual variation, affecting physiology and body condition via a number of pathways. Consequently, microbiome may be involved in ecological feedbacks, manifesting themselves as associations between microbiome characteristics and ecological factors experienced by individuals. In this study we report on the diversity and habitat dependence of [...]
Collection and analysis of a global marine phytoplankton primary production dataset
Published: 2021-02-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phytoplankton primary production is a key oceanographic process. It has intimate relationships with the marine food webs dynamics, the global carbon cycle and the Earth’s climate. The study of phytoplankton production on a global scale relies on indirect approaches due to the difficulties associated with field campaigns. On the other hand, modelling approaches require in situ data for both [...]
Urban tolerance of birds changes throughout the full annual cycle
Published: 2021-02-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim: Our objective was to quantify urban tolerance for North American birds across the full annual cycle. We tested (1) whether intra-annual variability of urban tolerance differed between migrants and residents and (2) whether intra-annual variability of urban tolerance was phylogenetically conserved. We then assessed how the relationship between ecological and life history traits and urban [...]
Multi-replicated enrichment communities as a model system in microbial ecology
Published: 2021-01-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Recent advances in robotics and affordable genomic sequencing technologies have made it possible to establish and quantitatively track the assembly of enrichment communities in high-throughput. By conducting community assembly experiments in up to thousands of synthetic habitats, where the extrinsic sources of variation among replicates can be controlled, we can now study the reproducibility and [...]
Complex environments alter competitive dynamics in fungi
Published: 2021-01-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Competition is a key biotic factor that often structures natural communities. Many attempts to disentangle how competition shapes natural communities have relied on experiments on simplified systems or through simple mathematical models. But these simplified approaches are limited in their ability to represent the complexity seen in more natural settings. Here, we considered the competitive [...]
Collecting eco-evolutionary data in the dark: Impediments to subterranean research and how to overcome them
Published: 2020-12-23
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
(1) Caves and other subterranean habitats fulfill the requirements of experimental model systems to address general questions in ecology and evolution. Yet, the harsh working conditions of these environments and the uniqueness of the subterranean organisms have challenged most attempts to pursuit standardized research (2) Two main obstacles have synergistically hampered previous attempts. First, [...]
Computer vision, machine learning, and the promise of phenomics in ecology and evolutionary biology
Published: 2020-12-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
For centuries, ecologists and evolutionary biologists have used images such as drawings, paintings and photographs to record and quantify the shapes and patterns of life. With the advent of digital imaging, biologists continue to collect image data at an ever-increasing rate. This immense body of data provides insight into a wide range of biological phenomena, including phenotypic trait [...]
Space-for-time inferences about range-edge dynamics of tree species can be influenced by sampling biases
Published: 2020-12-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Differences between the distributions of tree saplings and adults in geographic or niche space have been used to infer climate change effects on tree range dynamics. Previous studies have reported narrower latitudinal or climatic niche ranges of juvenile trees compared to adults, concluding that tree ranges are contracting, contradicting climate-based predictions. However, more comprehensive [...]