Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Population Biology
Causes of recent changes in bill length in Crozet wandering albatross, a long-lived seabird
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
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
Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Current metrics of demographic resilience (e.g., resistance, recovery) summarize how populations respond to the frequent, varied disturbances that ecological systems experience. Much of the application of these metrics has focused on the potential response of populations represented by time-invariant, density-independent structured population models to hypothetical disturbances. Here, we show [...]
Phylogenetic Diversity vs H-Index – does genetics or culture lead conservation research?
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
Published: 2024-09-19
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 endangered endemic keystone lizard threatened by the rapid spread of an invasive predator
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Urbanization shapes global patterns of biodiversity. While often driving biodiversity loss and biotic homogenization, urban areas could paradoxically act as refugia for species threatened by other global change drivers, such as biological invasions. Despite growing interest in their conservation potential, a lack of robust empirical studies unveiling how urban refugia emerge and contribute to [...]
Climate change is associated with a higher extinction risk of a subshrub in anthropogenic landscapes
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 demographic studies 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 fill this [...]
An integrated population modelling workflow for supporting mesopredator management
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 its effects on mesopredator population dynamics in interaction with compensatory mechanisms and environmental conditions has rarely been assessed quantitatively due to data constraints. Recent [...]
Snakes (Erythrolamprus spp.) with a complex toxic diet show convergent yet highly heterogeneous voltage-gated sodium channel evolution
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Chemical defense plays a crucial role in shaping ecosystems through selection for toxin resistance and has evolved convergently across multiple lineages. Research on toxin resistance has been pivotal in understanding trait evolution, as it often evolves through a simple genetic mechanism, target-site resistance (TSR), where mutations in target genes confer resistance. However, in tropical [...]
Mapping migratory routes: Avian conservation-focused opportunities for a pan-European automated telemetry network
Published: 2024-07-17
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
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 like Arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus) [...]
Detection of energetic equivalence depends on food web architecture and estimators of energy use
Published: 2024-07-04
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. [...]
Quantifying life-history trade-offs in diameter growth for tropical tree species from a large urban inventory dataset
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
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 the new challenges 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 [...]
A Gene-Culture Co-Evolutionary Perspective on the Puzzle of Human Twinship
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 [...]