Filtering by Subject: Population Biology
Published: 2023-03-13
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Multivariate Analysis, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Ecological communities are dynamic. These dynamics are influenced by many sources of variation, making it difficult to understand or predict future change. Biotic interactions, and other sources of multi-species dependence, are major contributors. But ecological prediction overwhelmingly focuses on models that treat individual species in isolation. Here, we model the relative importance of [...]
Published: 2023-02-20
Subjects: Biology, Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Plant Sciences, Plant Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Many perennial plants in semi-arid rangelands have experienced population declines, and understanding the ecological and demographic processes behind these declines is important to slowing or reversing them. Although anthropogenic disturbances have driven declines across many landscapes, other sorts of environmental variability, such as the differences in intensity of solar radiation with aspect, [...]
Published: 2023-01-20
Subjects: Population Biology
Nearly all wild populations live in seasonal environments in which they experience regular fluctuations in environmental conditions that drive population dynamics. Recent empirical evidence from experimental populations of fruit flies suggests that demographic signals inherent in the counts of seasonal populations, including reproduction and survival, can indicate when in the annual cycle habitat [...]
Published: 2022-12-15
Subjects: Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Pathogenic Microbiology, Population Biology
Exchange of genetic material through sexual reproduction or horizontal gene transfer is ubiquitous in nature. Among the few outliers that rarely recombine and mainly evolve by *de novo* mutation are a group of deadly bacterial pathogens, including the causative agents of leprosy, plague, typhoid, and tuberculosis. The interplay of evolutionary processes is poorly understood in these organisms. [...]
Published: 2022-12-15
Subjects: Biostatistics, Dynamic Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Inferring the strength of species interactions from demographic data is a challenging task. The Integrated Population Modelling (IPM) approach, bringing together population counts, capture-recapture, and individual-level fecundity data into a unified model framework, has been extended from single species to the community level. This allows to specify IPMs for multiple species with interactions [...]
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genomics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Population Biology
Genetic data shows that cryptic hybrids are more common than previously thought and that hybridization and introgression are widespread processes in nature. Regardless of this, studies on hybridization are scarce for the highly speciose Bulbophyllum. The genus presents more than 2,200 species and many examples of recent radiations, in which hybridization is expected to be frequent. Currently, [...]
Published: 2022-09-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
In the Mediterranean Sea, interactions between marine species and human activities are prevalent. The coastal distribution of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and the predation pressure they put on fishing stocks lead to regular interactions with fisheries. Multispecies occupancy models allow mapping co-occurrence between two (or more) species while accounting for false negatives and [...]
Published: 2022-09-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Based on topographic field data, an argument is advanced that Soil houses ~2.1 x 10^24 taxa and supports >99.9% of global species biodiversity, mostly Bacteria or other microbes. Contradictory claims that Soil is home to only a quarter of biota while Ocean harbours 80-99% of Life on Earth are both dismissed. Earlier guesstimates of ~8.8 million taxa (~2.2 million or 25% marine), of 1-6 [...]
Published: 2022-09-13
Subjects: Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The many biophysical factors that shape how plant species sort across environmental gradients may include photoinhibition, which I define broadly as oxidative damage that plants and other phototrophs risk incurring when they absorb excess light energy they cannot safely dissipate. Photoinhibition is seldom explicitly discussed as a potential driver of plant fitness and distributions. Here, I aim [...]
Published: 2022-08-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
It has been suggested that animals may have evolved co-operative breeding strategies in response to extreme climatic conditions. Climate change, however, may push species beyond their ability to cope with extreme climates, and reduce the group sizes in co-operatively breeding species to a point where populations are no longer viable. Predicting the impact of future climates on these species is [...]
Published: 2022-07-27
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Light skin facilitates the penetration of ultraviolet light (UV) radiation through the skin, increasing the synthesis of vitamin D that in turn stimulates bone formation. It has been suggested that light skin appeared in the ancestors of modern Europeans as an adaptation to the conditions of low UV radiation in high latitudes; however, paleogenetic studies have recently shown it did not evolve [...]
Published: 2022-07-27
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Social networks are tied to population dynamics; interactions are driven by population density and demographic structure, while social relationships can be key determinants of survival and reproductive success. However, difficulties integrating models used in demography and network analysis have limited research at this interface. We introduce the R package genNetDem for simulating integrated [...]
Published: 2022-06-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Quantitatively and predictively linking the composition and function of microbial communities is a major aspiration of microbial ecology. It is also a critical step in the path toward engineering synthetic consortia and manipulating natural microbiomes. The functions of microbial communities are collective properties that emerge from a complex web of molecular interactions between individual [...]
Published: 2022-05-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Synchronous variation in demographic parameters across species destabilizes populations, metapopulations and metacommunities and increases extinction risks. Revealing the processes that synchronize population dynamics across species allows to identify trans-specific demographic processes that are subject to environmental forcing of overarching importance. Using a Bayesian, hierarchical [...]
Published: 2022-04-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Background and aims: Climate-change induced warmer spring temperatures advance tree leaf-out and result in earlier shading of the forest floor. Climate change also leads to more frequent droughts. Forest understorey herbs may respond to these environmental changes by varying functional traits at different hierarchical levels of organisation. While trait variation at the intra-specific level is [...]