Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Restored off-channel pond habitats create thermal regime diversity and refuges within a Mediterranean-climate watershed
Published: 2021-07-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Cool-water habitats provide increasingly vital refuges for cold-water fish living on the margins of their historical ranges; consequently, efforts to enhance or create cool-water habitat are becoming a major focus of river restoration practices. However, the effectiveness of restoration projects for providing thermal refuge and creating diverse temperature regimes at the watershed scale remains [...]
Seasonally variable relationships between surface water temperature and inflow in the upper San Francisco Estuary
Published: 2021-06-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Water temperature and inflow are key environmental drivers in aquatic systems that are linked through a causal web of factors including climate, weather, water management, and their downstream linkages. However, we do not yet fully understand the relationship between inflow and water temperature, especially in complex managed systems such as estuaries. The San Francisco Estuary is the center of a [...]
Optimizing stable isotope sampling design in terrestrial movement ecology research
Published: 2021-06-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. The recognition of adequate sampling designs is an interdisciplinary topic that has gained popularity over the last decades. In ecology, many research questions involve sampling across extensive and complex environmental gradients. This is the case for stable isotope analyses, which are widely used to characterize large-scale movement patterns and dietary preferences of organisms across taxa. [...]
Impacts of the invasive round goby (Neogobius melanostomus) on benthic invertebrate fauna: a case study from the Baltic Sea
Published: 2021-06-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The round goby (Neogobius melanostomus) was first observed in the Baltic Sea in 1990 and has since displayed substantial secondary dispersal, establishing numerous dense populations where they may outcompete native fish and negatively impact prey species. There have been multiple round goby diet studies from both the Baltic Sea and the North American Great Lakes where they are similarly invasive. [...]
An outline summary document of the current knowledge about prescribed vegetation burning impacts on ecosystem services compared to alternative mowing or no management
Published: 2021-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
A lay summary of our discussion paper: A critical review of the IUCN UK Peatland Programme’s “Burning and Peatlands” position statement (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13157-021-01400-1). In short, we discuss the prescribed burning on blanket bog evidence base and its interpretation within a UK context - specifically in relation to the International Union for Conservation of Nature UK [...]
Constructive criticism of “Misinterpreting carbon accumulation rates in records from near-surface peat” by Young et al: Further evidence of charcoal impacts in relation to long-term carbon storage on blanket bog under rotational burn management
Published: 2021-06-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
t is with great interest that we read the recent paper by Young et al. entitled “Misinterpreting carbon accumulation rates in records from near-surface peat”. However, we have some concerns about: (i) the use of an unvalidated deep drainage model to criticise studies investigating the impact of heather burning; (ii) the model scenarios and underlying model assumptions used; and (iii) misleading [...]
Understanding plant microbiomes requires a G x E framework
Published: 2021-05-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Plant microbiomes have become one of the hottest topics in plant biology. Driven by the increased availability of metagenome sequencing methods, analyses of plant-associated microbiomes have been skyrocketing during the last decade. They have generally taken one of two main perspectives: (1) a focus on the microbiome itself, where researchers describe microbiome diversity and attempt to [...]
Warming in the upper San Francisco Estuary: Patterns of water temperature change from 5 decades of data
Published: 2021-04-30
Subjects: Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Temperature is a key controlling variable from subcellular to ecosystem scales. Thus, climatic warming is expected to have broad impacts, especially in economically and ecologically valuable systems such as estuaries. The heavily managed upper San Francisco Estuary supplies water to millions of people and is home to fish species of high conservation, commercial, and recreational interest. Despite [...]
Increased adoption of best practices in ecological forecasting enables comparisons of forecastability
Published: 2021-04-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Near-term iterative forecasting is a powerful tool for ecological decision support and has the potential to transform our understanding of ecological predictability. However, to this point, there has been no cross-ecosystem analysis of near-term ecological forecasts, making it difficult to synthesize diverse research efforts and prioritize future developments for this emerging field. In this [...]
Welcome to the Pyrocene: animal survival in the age of megafire
Published: 2021-04-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Planet Earth is entering the age of megafire, pushing ecosystems to their limits and beyond. While fire causes mortality of animals across vast portions of the globe, scientists are only beginning to consider fire as an evolutionary force in animal ecology. Here, we generate a series of hypotheses regarding animal responses to fire by adopting insights from the predator-prey literature. Fire is a [...]
Fungus-bacterium associations are widespread in fungal cultures isolated from a semi-arid natural grassland in Germany
Published: 2021-04-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
We here report on a study that aimed at establishing a large soil-fungal culture collection spanning a wide taxonomic diversity and systematically screening the collection for bacterial associations.
Contrasting climate velocity impacts in warm and cool locations show that effects of marine warming are worse in already warmer temperate waters
Published: 2021-04-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Species responses to climate change are often measured at broad spatiotemporal scales, which can miss fine-scale changes that are relevant to conservation and fisheries management. We develop a scale-able geostatistical approach to assess how juvenile and adult fish distributions have been shaped by changes in bottom temperature and dissolved oxygen over a recent decade of warming in the [...]
Weak but persistent provenance effects modulate the response of Quercus robur (Fagaceae) seedlings to elevated temperature
Published: 2021-03-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Background and aims Clinal variation in bud phenology and growth has repeatedly been reported in common garden experiments for many tree species. The response of the seedlings generated from such translocated trees has not been studied yet, despite its relevance regarding the role of transgenerational plasticity in the adaptation of long-living trees in the face of climate change. Here, we aim to [...]
Deploying Ecological Countermeasures as a Biosecurity Imperative
Published: 2021-03-09
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Immunopathology, International Public Health, Life Sciences, Maternal and Child Health, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Population Biology, Public Health, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Veterinary Microbiology and Immunobiology, Veterinary Pathology and Pathobiology, Zoology
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought biosecurity to the forefront of national security policy. Land use change is a fundamental driver of zoonotic disease outbreaks, yet substantial study is yet required to unravel the mechanisms by which land use-induced spillover operates. Ecological degradation may be the 21st Century’s most overlooked security threat. Within the biosecurity context, we introduce [...]
Nonlinear ecosystem responses to leaf litter subsidies in experimental ponds
Published: 2021-03-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Subsidies of matter between ecosystems can strongly affect trophic interactions in food webs, yet most experiments apply a binary (i.e., subsidy vs. no subsidy) approach. This emphasis on extremes implicitly assumes linear relationships and fails to capture potential nonlinear effects in ecosystem responses along gradients of subsidy amount seen in real systems. To examine the effects of such [...]