Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Population Biology
Spatially varying population indices
Published: 2025-04-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Population Biology
Large scale monitoring is fundamental for reliably tracking the fate of animal populations under changing environments and land-use practices. A common application of large scale population monitoring data is to produce indices of temporal change in species abundances, which are used in environmental policy assessments of species and biodiversity statuses. For index estimation, spatio-temporal [...]
Drought-induced tree mortality affects the space-use and individual plasticity of an endangered forest carnivore
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Rapid changes in landscape structure can disrupt the ecology and life history of species of conservation concern. Shifting climate, land-use, and disturbance regimes are generating novel landscape patterns, and it is unclear how these novel conditions may affect imperiled species. In the Sierra Nevada of California, USA, extensive drought-induced tree mortality has rapidly altered forest [...]
Ecological harshness mediates reproductive trade-offs in a great tit population
Published: 2025-04-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Population Biology
Lack’s seminal work on bird clutch sizes has spurred expansive research on reproductive trade-offs, especially focusing on offspring quantity–quality trade-offs and the potential fitness consequences for the parents. The environment is a critical driver of the expression of individual reproductive traits, influencing them through plastic responses. However, the plasticity of reproductive [...]
Viability selection on coat spot patterns correlates with temperature anomalies in Masai giraffes
Published: 2025-03-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Remarkable variation in animal colour patterns is often shaped by heterogeneous selection, reflecting adaptation to variable environmental conditions. However, the adaptive functions of patterns and drivers of selection remain poorly understood. Shape and size of colour patterns may help with thermoregulation and thus be altered by temperature anomalies, which are predicted to be more frequent [...]
Conservation macrogenetics reveals the potential hidden consequences of the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires on Australian biodiversity
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
The use of genetic analyses has become ubiquitous in conservation planning and management as biodiversity is increasingly threatened globally. Typically, such analyses are employed at the species-level, though as genetic data accrue, it is now possible to consider the genetic composition of multiple species across landscapes. Such macrogenetic perspectives can reveal the potential genetic [...]
Validating causal inference in time series models with conditional-independence tests
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Sustainability
Ecologists often use time-series models to approximate dynamics arising from density dependence, species interactions, community synchrony, and other processes. Dynamic structural equation models can represent simultaneous and lagged interactions among variables with missing data, and therefore encompasses a wide family of analyses (linear regression, vector autoregressive models, and dynamic [...]
Rapid widespread declines of an abundant coastal shark
Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Population Biology
Determining population trends is challenging for marine species with transboundary ranges, but increasingly important given the redistribution of species across international borders with climate change. Here, we use spatiotemporal models fit to data from 10 scientific surveys to evaluate trends in biomass, abundance, and distribution for Pacific Spiny Dogfish (Squalus suckleyi) across their [...]
Rapid declines in southern Sierra Nevada fisher habitat driven by drought and wildfire
Published: 2025-02-27
Subjects: Forest Management, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Forest disturbances are a natural ecological process, but climate and land-use change are altering disturbance regimes at an unprecedented rate, posing significant threats to biological communities and species of concern. Our aim was to develop an automated habitat monitoring system for the Southern Sierra Nevada Distinct Population Segment of fisher (Pekania pennanti) in California, USA to [...]
Quantifying changes in fish population stability using statistical early warnings of regime shifts
Published: 2025-02-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Ecological conservation and management benefits from tools that can foresee impending problems, or those in early stages. Statistical early warnings of regime shifts, which can identify generic changes in system behavior associated with stability loss and potential abrupt changes to a new, distinct state, are theoretically well grounded and have been successfully applied in real-world settings. [...]
On the feasibility of nonadaptive, nonsequential abiogenesis
Published: 2025-02-18
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Computational Biology, Evolution, Molecular Biology, Molecular Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Systems Biology
The emergence of life from non-living matter remains one of the most profound unresolved questions in natural philosophy. Classical models derived from the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis assume a gradual (sequential), selective assembly of biological precursors. Yet, for more than a century, all experimental efforts in this direction have failed in their attempt to achieve material abiogenesis. May be [...]
Northward expansion of the thermal limit for the tick Ixodes ricinus over the past 40 years
Published: 2025-02-14
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
The tick Ixodes ricinus is the main pathogen vector in Europe. Many speculations have been made about the effect of past climate change on the potential distribution of this ectothermic organism, despite a poor understanding of how climate change has resulted in distribution changes to date. In this study, we used a public cross-sectional dataset of I. ricinus abundance at the northern edge of [...]
Prevalence of Leaf Parasitism by Insects and Fungi in Wild Plant Communities: Implications for Community Assembly
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Parasitology, Plant Pathology, Population Biology
Parasitism by infectious diseases and insect pests significantly shapes wild plant communities by stabilizing them through suppressing dominant species and destabilizing them by suppressing minor species. However, the dynamics of parasitism in wild ecosystems remain understudied. This study aimed to determine whether parasites infect a wide range of host species or are plant-specific, assess the [...]
Bottom-up interactions in age-structured stock assessment and state-space mass-balance modelling
Published: 2025-01-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology
Age-structured stock assessment models are used worldwide to predict the likely impact of changing harvest on future fisheries yield. However, age-structured models ignore the impacts of predator consumption on prey survival (top-down impacts) and prey availability on predator growth (bottom-up impacts), whereas multispecies statistical catch-at-age models often incorporate top-down but not [...]
AI and Big Data for invasion biology: finding, modelling and forecasting the population dynamics of invaders
Published: 2025-01-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the study and management of invasive species through analytical and predictive tools that optimize detection, monitoring, and automated eradication. In this work, we reviewed the fundamental principles of machine learning and deep learning, illustrated with recent case studies on invasive species. We also present the first systematic review of [...]
Reduced levels of relatedness indicate that great-tailed grackles disperse further at the edge of their range
Published: 2024-12-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
It is generally thought that behavioral flexibility, the ability to change behavior when circumstances change, plays an important role in the ability of a species to rapidly expand their geographic range. However, it is an alternative non-exclusive possibility that an increase in the amount of available habitat can also facilitate a range expansion. Great-tailed grackles (*Quiscalus mexicanus*) [...]