Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Population Biology

Combining the resurrection approach with transplant experiments to investigate adaptation of plant populations to environmental change

Pascal Karitter, Martí March-Salas, Andreas Ensslin, et al.

Published: 2023-05-25
Subjects: Evolution, Plant Sciences, Population Biology

Recent climatic changes, such as more frequent droughts and heatwaves, can lead to rapid evolutionary adaptations in plant populations. Such rapid evolution can be investigated using the resurrection approach by comparing plants raised from stored ancestral and contemporary seeds from the same population. This approach has so far only been used in common garden experiments, allowing to reveal [...]

Spatially explicit Bayesian hierarchical models for avian population status and trends

Adam C Smith, Allison Binley, Lindsay Daly, et al.

Published: 2023-05-18
Subjects: Population Biology

Population trend estimates form the core of avian conservation assessments in North America and indicate important changes in the state of the natural world. The models used to estimate these trends would be more efficient and informative for conservation if they explicitly considered the spatial locations of the monitoring data. We created spatially explicit versions of some standard status and [...]

Forecasting rodent population dynamics and community transitions with dynamic nonlinear models

Nicholas Joshua Clark, SKM Ernest, Henry Senyondo, et al.

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 [...]

Potential demographic collapse in a common perennial bunchgrass on south-facing slopes in a semi-arid grassland via dramatically reduced seedling establishment

Timothy H Parker, Alex Gerber, Erin Campbell, et al.

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, [...]

When habitat is lost matters: patterns of population decline and time to extinction in a seasonal, density-dependent model

Joseph Burant, D. Ryan Norris

Published: 2023-01-21
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 [...]

How do monomorphic bacteria evolve? The *Mycobacterium tuberculosis* complex and the awkward population genetics of extreme clonality

Sebastien Gagneux, Christoph Stritt

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. [...]

Assessing species interactions using integrated predator-prey models

Matthieu Paquet, Frederic Barraquand

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 [...]

Hybridization boosters diversification in a Neotropical orchid group

Cecilia F. Fiorini, Eric de Camargo Smidt, L. Lacey Knowles, et al.

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, [...]

Using integrated multispecies occupancy models to map co-occurrence between bottlenose dolphins and fisheries in the Gulf of Lion, French Mediterranean Sea

Valentin Lauret, Hélène Labach, Léa David, et al.

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 are a relevant framework to estimate co-occurrence between two (or more) species while accounting for [...]

New Global Species Biodiversity: Soil soars, Ocean flounders

Robert Blakemore

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 [...]

When and how does photoinhibition matter for plant fitness?

Shan Kothari

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 [...]

Dog days are over: climate change is predicted to cause population collapse in a cooperative breeder

Daniella Rabaiotti, Rosie Woodroffe, Tim Coulson

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 [...]

European light skin may have evolved as an adaptation to the Neolithic sedentary lifestyle

Manuel Ferrando-Bernal

Published: 2022-07-28
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 [...]

Generation and applications of simulated datasets to integrate social network and demographic analyses

Matthew Silk, Olivier Gimenez

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 [...]

The community-function landscape of microbial consortia

Alvaro Sanchez, Djordje Bajic, Juan Diaz-Colunga, et al.

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 [...]

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