Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Population Biology

Traditional water structures in villages support amphibian populations within a protected landscape

Jose W. Valdez, Jeremy Dertien, Haruna Fimmel, et al.

Published: 2024-11-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology

Amphibians are among the most globally threatened vertebrates, with habitat loss and degradation being the primary drivers of their decline. While natural wetlands are essential for amphibian survival, artificial habitats can also play a significant role as refuges, especially in human-altered landscapes. This study examines the role of artificial waterbodies in supporting amphibian populations [...]

New technology for an ancient fish: A lamprey life cycle modeling tool with an R Shiny application

Dylan G. E. Gomes, Joseph Benjamin, Benjamin Clemens, et al.

Published: 2024-11-25
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Population Biology, Systems Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Lampreys (Petromyzontiformes) are an ancient group of fishes with complex life histories. We created a life cycle model that includes an R Shiny interactive web application interface to simulate abundance by life stage. This will allow scientists and managers to connect available demographic information in a framework that can be applied to questions regarding lamprey biology and conservation. We [...]

Causes of recent changes in bill length in Crozet wandering albatross, a long-lived seabird

Laura Martinez Anton, Karine Delord, Christophe Barbraud, et al.

Published: 2024-11-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Population Biology

Phenotypes are changing in many wild populations, largely in response to environmental changes due to human activities. Phenotypic change can be driven by several mechanisms, with contrasted consequences for the persistence of populations. Identifying those mechanisms is key to understand current responses to human pressures and to predict the future fate of populations. Here we attempt to [...]

Evolutionarily Optimal Phage Life-History Traits

Joan Roughgarden

Published: 2024-11-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Population Biology

Optimal phage life-history traits are computed from data on phenotypic tradeoffs presented in De Paepe and Tadei (2006). A parameter is introduced, l_e, that describes the loss of virions in the environment. Hygienic interventions increase l_e. The optimal burst size decreases with l_e and the optimal capsid thickness increases with l_e. The optimal viral fitness also decreases with l_e. An [...]

Density dependence impacts our understanding of population resilience

Christina Maria Hernandez, Iain Stott, David Koons, et al.

Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology

Current metrics of demographic resilience (e.g., resistance, recovery) summarize the potential responses of populations to the frequent, varied disturbances that ecological systems experience. Much of the application of these metrics has focused on the potential response of time-invariant, density-independent structured population models to hypothetical disturbances. Here, we examine such [...]

Phylogenetic Diversity vs H-Index – does genetics or culture lead conservation research?

Jess Tam, William K Cornwell, Roxane Francis

Published: 2024-09-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology

With so many species in decline it is difficult to know where conservation effort and funding should be dedicated. A common prioritization argument is species uniqueness and phylogenetic diversity, where those with unique evolutionary history are thought to be especially valuable. However, despite frequent calls for better prioritization, research interest is often idiosyncratic, pragmatic, and [...]

Demographic expansion and panmixia in a St. Martin endemic, Anolis pogus, coincides with the decline of a competitor

Michael L Yuan, Joost Merjenburgh, Timothy P. van Wagensveld, et al.

Published: 2024-09-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Population Biology, Zoology

Understanding patterns of differentiation at microgeographic scales can enhance our understanding of evolutionary dynamics and lead to the development of effective conservation strategies. In particular, high levels of landscape heterogeneity can strongly influence species abundances, genetic structure, and demographic trends. The bearded anole, Anolis pogus, is endemic to the topographically [...]

Urban refugia enhance persistence of an endemic keystone species facing a rapidly spreading invasive predator

Marc Vez-Garzón, Sandra Moreno, Guillem Casbas, et al.

Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology

Urbanization shapes global biodiversity, often driving biodiversity loss and biotic homogenization. However, urban areas could paradoxically enhance conservation by acting as refugia for declining populations due to other global change components, such as biological invasions. Despite growing interest in the potential of urban areas to promote biodiversity conservation, the lack of robust [...]

Climate change amplifies extinction risk of a subshrub in anthropogenic landscapes

Eva Conquet, Arpat Ozgul, Susana Gómez-González, et al.

Published: 2024-09-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology

In most ecosystems, the increasingly strong effects of climate change on biodiversity co-occur with other anthropogenic pressures, most importantly land-use change. However, many long-term studies of population dynamics focus on populations monitored in protected areas, and our understanding of how climate change will affect population persistence under anthropogenic land use is still limited. To [...]

An integrated population modelling workflow for supporting mesopredator management

Chloé R. Nater, Stijn P. Hofhuis, Matthew Grainger, et al.

Published: 2024-08-01
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Survival Analysis, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology

Expanding populations of mesopredators threaten biodiversity and human health in many ecosystems across the world. Lethal control through harvest is commonly implemented as a mitigation measure, yet the effects of harvest and its interaction with environmental conditions on mesopredator population dynamics have rarely been assessed quantitatively due to data constraints. Recent advances [...]

Snakes (Erythrolamprus spp.) with a complex toxic diet show convergent yet highly heterogeneous voltage-gated sodium channel evolution

Valeria Ramírez-Castañeda, Rebecca Tarvin, Roberto Marquez

Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology

Chemical defenses shape ecosystems by orchestrating interactions between species and promoting specialization on toxic prey. Many toxins exist in highly biodiverse tropical ecosystems, sometimes in the same prey, imposing challenges for studying toxin resistance and requiring the development of new models. Royal ground snakes (Erythrolamprus) play a significant but understudied role as predators [...]

Scanning the skies for migrants: Conservation-focused opportunities for a pan-European automated telemetry network

Lucy Mitchell, Vera Brust, Thiemo Karwinkel, et al.

Published: 2024-07-18
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology

Accelerated biodiversity loss during the Anthropocene has destabilised functional links within and between ecosystems. Migratory species that cross different ecosystems on their repeated journeys between breeding and non-breeding sites are particularly sensitive to global change because they are exposed to various, often ecosystem-specific threats. As these bring both lethal and non-lethal [...]

Marine resources alter tundra food web dynamics by subsidizing a terrestrial predator on the sea ice

Sean M Johnson-Bice, Frank B. Baldwin, Evan Richardson, et al.

Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology

Predator use of resource subsidies can strengthen top-down effects on prey when predators respond numerically to subsidies. Although allochthonous subsidies are generally transported along natural gradients, consumers can cross ecosystem boundaries to acquire subsidies, thereby linking disparate ecosystems. In coastal Arctic ecosystems, terrestrial predators can easily cross into the marine [...]

Detection of energetic equivalence depends on food web architecture and estimators of energy use

Poppy Joaquina Romera, Benoit Gauzens, Ana Carolina Antunes, et al.

Published: 2024-07-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Ecologists have long debated the universality of the energetic equivalence rule (EER), which posits that population energy use should be invariant with average body size due to negative size–density scaling. We explored size–density and size–energy use scaling across 183 geographically–distributed soil invertebrate food webs to investigate the universality of these fundamental EER assumptions. [...]

Gaining insights into the life-history strategies of tropical tree species from a large urban inventory dataset

Hao Ran Lai, Daniel C Burcham, James Wei Wang, et al.

Published: 2024-06-11
Subjects: Forest Biology, Forest Management, Horticulture, Integrative Biology, Plant Biology, Population Biology

Trees are important ecosystem service providers that improve the physical environment and human experience in cities throughout the world. Since the ecosystem services and maintenance requirements of urban trees change as they grow in time, predictive models of tree growth rates are useful to forecast societal benefits and maintenance costs over a tree’s lifetime. However, many models to date are [...]

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