Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Population Biology
The Evolutionary Puzzle of Human Twinship
Published: 2023-11-15
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 [...]
An illusion of a macroecological law, abundance-occupancy relationships
Published: 2023-11-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
In macroecology, a classic empirical observation has been positive relationships between local abundance and species' range, known as the abundance-occupancy relationships (AORs). The existence of this empirical relationship has informed both theory development and applied questions. Notably, the spatial neutral model of biodiversity predicts AORs. Yet, based on the largest known meta-analysis of [...]
Patterns and drivers of population trends on individual Breeding Bird Survey routes using spatially explicit models and route-level covariates
Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
Spatial patterns in population trends, particularly those at finer geographic scales, can help us better understand the factors driving population change in North American birds. The standard trend models for the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) were designed to estimate trends within broad geographic strata, such as countries, Bird Conservation Regions, U.S. states, and Canadian [...]
Seasonality mediates vital-rate responses to socially- and spatially-explicit density in an African lion population
Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Population Biology
Environment-density interactions have important effects on vital rates and population dynamics, especially in species whose demography is strongly influenced by social context, such as the African lion Panthera leo. In populations of such species, the response of vital rates to density can vary depending on the social structure (e.g. effects of group size or composition). However, studies [...]
Avian zoochory is a probable pathway of European perch colonization in artificial lakes: a reply to Vasemägi et al (2023)
Published: 2023-10-14
Subjects: Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Growth and opportunities for drone surveillance in pinniped research
Published: 2023-09-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology
Pinniped species undergo uniquely amphibious life histories that make them valuable subjects for many domains of research. Pinniped research has often progressed hand-in-hand with technological frontiers of wildlife biology, and drones represent a leap forward for methods of aerial remote sensing, heralding data collection and integration at new scales of biological importance. Drone methods and [...]
How does dispersal shape the genetic patterns of animal populations in European cities? A simulation approach
Published: 2023-07-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Context and objectives Although urbanization is a major driver of biodiversity erosion, it does not affect all species equally. The neutral genetic structure of populations in a given species is affected by both genetic drift and gene flow processes. In cities, the size of animal populations determines drift and can depend on multiple processes whereas gene flow essentially depends on the [...]
Recent human-bear conflicts in Northern Italy: a review, with considerations of future perspectives
Published: 2023-07-17
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Zoology
The killing of a runner in Northern Italy by a brown bear (Ursus arctos arctos) and the subsequent investigation of such matter highlighted a Human-Wildlife Conflict (HWC) that has been present in Trentino since the introduction of bears for conservation during the Life Ursus Project. Such conflict may be exacerbated as both human and bear populations get bigger. In this paper, I summarize the [...]
Camtrap DP: An open standard for the FAIR exchange and archiving of camera trap data
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Population Biology
Camera trapping has revolutionized wildlife ecology and conservation by providing automated data acquisition, leading to the accumulation of massive amounts of camera trap data worldwide. Although management and processing of camera trap-derived Big Data are becoming increasingly solvable with the help of scalable cyber-infrastructures, harmonization and exchange of the data remain limited, [...]
Heterogeneous dispersal networks to improve biodiversity science
Published: 2023-06-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Dispersal plays a key role in shaping spatial patterns of biodiversity, yet its spatial heterogeneity is often overlooked in biodiversity analyses and management strategies. Properly parametrized heterogeneous dispersal networks capture the complex interplay between landscape structure and species-specific dispersal capacities. This heterogeneity, however, is recurrently neglected when studying [...]
Combining the resurrection approach with transplant experiments to investigate adaptation of plant populations to environmental change
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 improve avian population status and trends
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 [...]
Multi-species dependencies improve forecasts of population dynamics in a long-term monitoring study
Published: 2023-03-13
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Multivariate Analysis, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Forecasts of community dynamics are essential for the management of biodiversity. Theory suggests these predictions can be improved by leveraging multi-species dependencies to improve models, but empirical support for this is lacking. We test whether models that learn from multiple species, both to estimate nonlinear environmental effects and temporal dependence, improve forecasts for a semi-arid [...]
Solar radiation drives potential demographic collapse in a perennial bunchgrass via dramatically reduced seedling establishment
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 drive many declines, other sorts of environmental variability, such as the differences in solar radiation with aspect, may impact population success [...]
Demographic signals of population decline and time to extinction in a seasonal, density-dependent model
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 Drosophila suggests that demographic signals inherent in the counts of seasonal populations, including reproduction and survival, can indicate when in the annual cycle habitat [...]