Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Selective Breeding to Support the Long-Term Persistence of Coral Reefs
Published: 2021-10-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The decline of coral reefs has prompted an emergent field of research on the potential for various biological interventions focused on increasing stress tolerance in corals. Among these is selective breeding, the selection and reproductive crossing of parental stock based on a trait of interest with the goal of enhancing the frequency or intensity of the trait in subsequent generations. Selective [...]
Learning from your mistakes: a novel method to predict the response to directional selection
Published: 2021-09-28
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Predicting how populations respond to selection is a key goal of evolutionary biology. The field of quantitative genetics provides predictions for the response to directional selection through the breeder’s equation. However, differences between the observed responses to selection and those predicted by the breeder’s equation occur. The sources of these errors include omission of traits under [...]
Agricultural rewilding: a prospect for livestock systems
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
Published: 2021-09-20
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.
Published: 2021-09-11
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
Published: 2021-09-10
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
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
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
Published: 2021-08-27
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
Published: 2021-08-16
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?
Published: 2021-08-06
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
Published: 2021-08-06
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
Published: 2021-06-30
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
Published: 2021-06-24
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
Published: 2021-06-12
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 [...]