Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Population Biology

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 [...]

Behavioral flexibility is similar in two closely related species where only one is rapidly expanding its geographic range

Corina J Logan, Kelsey McCune, Carol Rowney, et al.

Published: 2024-06-06
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Comparative Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology

Human modified environments are rapidly increasing, which puts other species in the precarious position of either adapting to a new area or, if they are not able to adapt, shifting their range to a more suitable environment. 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 [...]

A Gene-Culture Co-Evolutionary Perspective on the Puzzle of Human Twinship

Augusto Dalla Ragione, Cody Ross, Daniel Redhead

Published: 2024-05-20
Subjects: Biological and Physical Anthropology, Evolution, Maternal and Child Health, Population Biology, Social and Cultural Anthropology

Natural selection should favor litter sizes that optimize trade-offs between brood-size and offspring viability. Across the primate order, modal litter size is one, suggesting a deep history of selection favoring minimal litters. Humans, however---despite having the longest juvenile period and slowest life-history of all primates---still produce twin-births at appreciable rates, even though such [...]

MECHANISTIC MODEL OF VEGETATION STRUCTURE AND ANIMAL COMMUNITY INTERACTIONS-INTEGRATING GEDI & TLS DATA IN THE MADINGLEY MODEL

Camille Gaillard, Christopher Doughty, Andrew J Abraham, et al.

Published: 2024-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology

Background Vegetation structure is increasingly recognized as a key variable to explain ecosystems states and dynamics. New Remote Sensing tools are available to complement labor intensive field investigations and consider the global biogeography of this parameter. Objectives We propose to model the processes explaining the interaction between vegetation structure and animal community assembly [...]

MacArthur’s consumer-resource model: a Rosetta Stone for competitive interactions

Jawad Sakarchi, Rachel Germain

Published: 2024-04-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology

Recent developments in competition theory, namely, Modern Coexistence Theory (MCT), have aided empiricists in formulating tests of species persistence, coexistence, and evolution from simple to complex community settings. However, the parameters used to predict competitive outcomes, such as interaction coefficients, invasion growth rates, or stabilizing differences, remain biologically opaque, [...]

The natural history of luck: A synthesis study of structured population models

Christina Maria Hernandez, Stephen P Ellner, Robin E. Snyder, et al.

Published: 2024-04-12
Subjects: Life Sciences, Population Biology

Chance pervades life. In turn, life histories are described by probabilities (e.g., survival, breeding) and averages across individuals (e.g., mean growth rate, age at maturity). In this study, we explored patterns of luck in lifetime outcomes by analyzing structured population models for a wide array of plant and animal species. We calculated four response variables: variance and skewness in [...]

Why there are so many definitions of fitness in models

Daniel Jefferson Smith, Guilhem Doulcier, Pierrick Bourrat, et al.

Published: 2024-04-11
Subjects: Biology, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Population Biology

“Fitness” quantifies the ability to survive and reproduce, but is operationalized in many different ways. Generally, short-term fitness (e.g., expected number of surviving offspring) is assigned to genotypes or phenotypes, and used to non-trivially derive longer-term operationalizations of fitness (e.g. fixation probability or sojourn time), providing insight as to which organismal [...]

Searching for and Monitoring the Nests of Imperiled Grassland Birds: Recommendations from the Grand River Grasslands of Iowa

Jaime Jo Coon, Hannah K Grushon, Jennifer L Shamel, et al.

Published: 2024-04-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Grassland birds are the most imperiled avian group in North America, with greater than 50% abundance declines since 1970. Studies examining factors that impact habitat preferences, habitat selection, and reproductive success are critical to developing effective conservation and management plans for these species. These studies often involve searching for and monitoring nests in grasslands, which [...]

Interplay of abiotic, biotic, and individual factors in shaping individual growth and demography in a high-elevation common toad population

Omar Lenzi, Kurt Grossenbacher, Silvia Zumbach, et al.

Published: 2024-04-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology

1. Vital rates of individuals in natural populations, such as survival and breeding probabilities, can be affected by abiotic (i.e. environmental conditions), biotic (e.g. population density), and individual factors (i.e. individual traits). Many studies often consider the direct effects of one or two of these sources of vital-rate variations, but taking them all into account might reveal [...]

Lumpfish, Cyclopterus lumpus, distribution in the Gulf of Maine, USA: observations from fisheries independent and dependent catch data

Elizabeth A. Fairchild, Sophie Wulfing, Easton R White

Published: 2024-03-29
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology

The Gulf of Maine (GoM) is one of the fastest-warming parts of the world’s oceans. Some species’ distributional shifts have already been documented, especially for commercially-important species. Less is known about species that are not currently exploited but may become so in the future. As a case study into these issues, we focus on lumpfish (Cyclopterus lumpus) because of the recognized and [...]

Not All Mass Mortality Events are Equal

Samantha Jean Sawyer, Micky D. Eubanks, Jeffery K. Tomberlin

Published: 2024-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Population Biology

Mass Mortality Events (MMEs) are defined as novel events involving many individuals dying in a relatively short period of time. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in MMEs due to their perceived increase in frequency. Current definitions are subjective and categorize mortalities varying in magnitude and frequency together. Within this manuscript, Multiple Mortality Events is a [...]

Large-scale spatiotemporal variation in vital rates and population dynamics of an alpine bird

Chloé R. Nater, James A. Martin, Erlend Birkeland Nilsen

Published: 2024-02-01
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Statistical Models

Quantifying temporal and spatial variation in animal population size and demography is a central theme in ecological research and important for directing management and policy. However, this requires field sampling at large spatial extents and over long periods of time, which is not only prohibitively costly but often politically untenable. Participatory monitoring programs (also called citizen [...]

Multiple habitat graphs: how connectivity brings forth landscape ecological processes

Paul Savary, Céline Clauzel, Jean-Christophe Foltête, et al.

Published: 2024-01-30
Subjects: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Purpose: Habitat connectivity is integral to current biodiversity science and conservation strategies. Originally, the connectivity concept stressed the role of individual movements for landscape-scale processes. Connectivity determines whether populations can survive in sub-optimal patches (i.e., source-sink effects), complete life cycles relying on different habitat types (i.e., landscape [...]

The genetic basis of a regionally isolated sexual dimorphism involves cortex

Kalle Tunström, Ramprasad neethiraj, Naomi L.P. Keehnen, et al.

Published: 2024-01-29
Subjects: Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology

Sexual dimorphisms represent a source of phenotypic variation and result from differences in how natural and sexual selection act on males and females within a species. Identifying the genetic basis of dimorphism can be challenging, especially once it is fixed within a species. However, studying polymorphisms, even when fixed within a population, can provide insights into the genetic basis of [...]

Hybridization potential of brown trout, with particular reference to invaded environments

Craig F Purchase, Connor Hanley, Tyler H. Lantiegne, et al.

Published: 2024-01-25
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology

Hybridization is a complex process beginning with the mating of two species. However, hybrid offspring frequency does not predict hetero-specific mating frequency, as post-mating, both pre-zygotic and post-zygotic barriers influence their occurrence. Post-zygotic outbreeding depression usually results in poor embryo-juvenile survival or the production of sterile hybrid offspring. Females have [...]

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