Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Agricultural rewilding: a prospect for livestock systems

Aymeric Mondiere, Michael S. Corson, Lois Morel, et al.

Published: 2021-09-23
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

CONTEXT: Agricultural intensification is a major cause of biodiversity loss. Biodiversity conservation and restoration generally involve human intervention. In comparison, rewilding, a radically different approach to address the erosion of biodiversity, aims to increase the ability of ecological processes to act with little or no human intervention, and thus to enhance biodiversity and the supply [...]

Matrix quality determines the strength of habitat loss filtering on bird communities at the landscape scale

Melina de Souza Leite, Andrea Larissa Boesing, Jean Paul Metzger, et al.

Published: 2021-09-19
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Habitat loss represent a major threat to biodiversity, however, the modulation of their effects by the non-habitat matrix surrounding habitat patches is still undervalued. The landscape matrix might change community assembly in different ways. For example, low-quality matrices can accentuate environmental filtering by reducing resource availability and/or deteriorating abiotic conditions but they [...]

Network-based analysis reveals differences in plant assembly between the native and the invaded ranges.

Laura del Rio-Hortega, Irene Martín-Forés, Isabel Castro, et al.

Published: 2021-09-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Associated with the introduction of exotic species in a new area, interactions with other native species within the recipient community occur, reshaping the original community and resulting in a unique assemblage. Yet, the differences in community assemblage between native and invaded ranges remain unclear. Mediterranean grasslands provide an excellent scenario to study community assembly [...]

Assessing climate risk to support urban forests in a changing climate

Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, Paul Rymer, Sally Power, et al.

Published: 2021-09-09
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

The management of urban forests is a key element of resilience planning in cities across the globe. Urban forests provide ecosystem services as well as other nature-based solutions to 4.2 billion people living in cities. However, to continue to do so effectively, urban forests need to be able to thrive in an increasingly changing climate. Trees in cities are vulnerable to extreme heat and drought [...]

Harmonizing taxon names in biodiversity data: a review of tools, databases, and best practices

Matthias Grenié, Emilio Berti, Juan D. Carvajal-Quintero, et al.

Published: 2021-09-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

1. The process of standardizing taxon names, taxonomic name harmonization, is necessary to properly merge data indexed by taxon names. The large variety of taxonomic databases and related tools are often not well described. It is often unclear which databases are actively maintained or what is the original source of taxonomic information. In addition, software to access these databases is [...]

Breeding in the pandemic: short-term lockdown restrictions do not alter reproductive decisions and avian life-history traits in a European capital city

Michela Corsini, Zuzanna Jagiello, Michal Walesiak, et al.

Published: 2021-09-01
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Humans are transforming natural habitats into managed urban green areas and impervious surfaces with unprecedented pace. Yet the effects of human presence per se on animal life-history traits are rarely tested. This is particularly true in cities, where human presence is often indissociable from urbanisation itself. The onset of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, along with the resulting lockdown [...]

The potential contribution of kurī (Polynesian dog) to the ecological impacts of the human settlement of Aotearoa New Zealand

Karen Greig, Nicolas J. Rawlence

Published: 2021-08-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

The pre-human Aotearoa New Zealand ecosystem was dominated by avian and reptilian species. Prior to first human settlement by East Polynesian colonists, the top predators were two giant raptorial birds. Aside from humans themselves, colonisation also resulted in the introduction of two novel mammalian predators into this naive ecosystem, the kiore (Pacific rat) and kurī (Polynesian dog). While [...]

Ecosystem size and complexity are extrinsic drivers of food chain length in branching networks

Justin Pomeranz, Jacques C. Finlay, Akira Terui

Published: 2021-08-15
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Understanding the drivers of food chain length in natural communities has intrigued ecologists since the publication of ‘food cycles’ by Elton in the early 20th century. Proposed drivers of food chain length have included extrinsic controls such as productivity, disturbance regime, and ecosystem size, as well as intrinsic factors including food web motifs. However, current theories have largely [...]

Men and wolves: are anthropogenic causes the main driver of wolf mortality in human-dominated landscapes in Italy?

Carmela Musto, Jacopo Cerri, Marco Galaverni, et al.

Published: 2021-08-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences

Over the last 40 years the gray wolf (Canis lupus) re-colonized its historical range in Italy increasing human-predator interactions. However, temporal and spatial trends in wolf mortality, including direct and indirect persecution, were never summarized. This study aims to fill this gap by focusing on the situation of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna regions, believed to host a significant proportion [...]

Early-life conditions impact juvenile telomere length, but do not predict later life-history strategies or fitness in a wild vertebrate

Janske van de Crommenacker, Martijn Hammers, Hannah L Dugdale, et al.

Published: 2021-08-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

1. Environmental conditions experienced during early life may have long-lasting effects on later-life phenotypes and fitness. Individuals experiencing poor early-life conditions may suffer subsequent fitness constraints. Alternatively, individuals may use a strategic ‘Predictive Adaptive Response’ (PAR), whereby they respond – in terms of physiology or life-history strategy – to the conditions [...]

A review of the heterogeneous landscape of biodiversity databases: opportunities and challenges for a synthesized biodiversity knowledge base

Xiao Feng, Brian Joseph Enquist, Daniel Park, et al.

Published: 2021-06-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Abstract Aim: Addressing global environmental challenges requires access to biodiversity data across wide spatial, temporal and biological scales. Recent decades have witnessed an exponential increase of biodiversity information aggregated by biodiversity databases (hereafter ‘databases’). However, heterogeneous coverage, protocols, and standards of databases hampered the data integration among [...]

Integrating natural and sexual selection across the biphasic life cycle

Craig Purchase, Jonathan Evans, Julissa Roncal

Published: 2021-06-23
Subjects: Agriculture, Behavior and Ethology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Food Biotechnology, Food Science, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

An alternation between diploid and haploid phases is universal among sexual eukaryotes. Across this biphasic cycle, natural selection and sexual selection occur in both phases. Together, these four stages of selection act on the phenotypes of individuals and influence the evolutionary trajectories of populations, but are rarely studied holistically. Here, we provide a conceptual framework that [...]

Disentangling food-web environment relationships: a review with guidelines

Frederico Mestre, Dominique Gravel, David García-Callejas, et al.

Published: 2021-06-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Food webs represent energy fluxes and nutrient cycling between interacting species, underpinning ecosystem functioning. Whether and how interactions vary over environmental gradients is still largely unknown. We reviewed the literature searching for systematic relationships between structural food-web properties and environmental gradients. Temperature and biotic factors are amongst the most [...]

UAS for Forest Inventory Traits: A Review

Anna Spiers, Victoria Scholl, Joe McGlinchy, et al.

Published: 2021-05-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Traits are notoriously challenging to measure at a desirably large spatial extent with traditional field methods, which limits the discoveries that forest ecologists can make with these data. There is a ripe opportunity for uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) to contribute to ecology through forest inventory trait mapping. UAS can help overcome the challenge of scale by collecting data at a larger [...]

A Community Convention for Ecological Forecasting: Output Files and Metadata

Michael C. Dietze, R. Quinn Thomas, Jody Peters, et al.

Published: 2021-05-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

This paper summarizes the open community conventions developed by the Ecological Forecasting Initiative (EFI) for the common formatting and archiving of ecological forecasts and the metadata associated with these forecasts. Such open standards are intended to promote interoperability and facilitate forecast communication, distribution, validation, and synthesis. For output files we first describe [...]

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