Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
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 [...]
Measuring competitive impact: joint-species modelling of invaded plant communities
Published: 2018-12-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Non-native species can dominate plant communities by competitively displacing native species, or because environmental change creates conditions favourable to non-native species but unfavourable to native species. We need to disentangle these alternative mechanisms so that management can target competitively dominant species and reduce their impacts. 2. Joint-species distribution models [...]
Developmental temperature affects phenotypic means and variability: a meta-analysis of fish data
Published: 2018-12-09
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Fishes are sensitive to their thermal environment, and face an uncertain future in a warming world. Theoretically, populations in novel environments might express greater levels of phenotypic variability to increase the chance of surviving – and eventually thriving – in the new conditions. Most research on the effect of the early thermal environment in fish species focuses on average phenotypic [...]
Female Maylandia zebra prefer victorious males
Published: 2018-11-10
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Females of a widespread species of the rock‐dwelling haplochromine cichlids of Lake Malawi, Maylandia zebra, show preference for males that successfully evict intruding males from their territory. This behaviour, experimentally induced by the investigators in a laboratory setting, was also preferred over males that were not permitted to interact with any other individual.