Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ecosystem size and complexity are extrinsic drivers of food chain length in branching networks
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 [...]
Community context matters for bacteria-phage ecology and evolution
Published: 2021-05-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Bacteria-phage symbioses are ubiquitous in nature and serve as valuable biological models. Historically, the ecology and evolution of bacteria-phage systems have been studied in either very simple or very complex communities. Although both approaches provide insight, their shortcomings limit our understanding of bacteria and phages in multispecies contexts. To address this gap, here we synthesize [...]
Individualised niches: an integrative conceptual framework across behaviour, ecology, and evolution
Published: 2021-05-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Individuals differ. This seemingly trivial statement has nevertheless led to paradigm shifts, as three different fields of organismal biology have seen a marked change in key concepts over the past few decades. In animal behaviour, it has increasingly been realised that behavioural differences among individuals can be stable over time and across contexts, giving rise to the concept of animal [...]
Slow improvement to the archiving quality of open datasets shared by researchers in ecology and evolution
Published: 2021-05-18
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Many leading journals in evolution and ecology now mandate open data upon publication. Yet, there is very little oversight to ensure the completeness and reusability of archived datasets, and we currently have a poor understanding of the factors associated with high quality (FAIR) data-sharing. We assessed 362 open datasets linked to first- or senior-authored papers published by 100 principal [...]
A practical guide to question formation, systematic searching and study screening for literature reviews in ecology and evolution
Published: 2021-05-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
1. Well-conducted systematic reviews are invaluable for synthesizing research findings. The conclusions of a review depend on how the research question was formulated, how relevant studies were found, and how studies were selected for synthesis. 2. Here, we present a practical guide for ecologists and evolutionary biologists on formulating a question for a systematic review, and finding a [...]
Evaluating ecological uniqueness over broad spatial extents using species distribution modelling
Published: 2021-05-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim: Local contributions to beta diversity (LCBD) can be used to identify sites with high ecological uniqueness and exceptional species composition within a region of interest. Yet, these indices are typically used on local or regional scales with relatively few sites, as they require information on complete community compositions difficult to acquire on larger scales. Here, we investigated how [...]
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: 2021-04-08
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 [...]