Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Population Biology
Metapopulation-level associations in mutualistic stream fishes
Published: 2021-09-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Positive biotic interactions are recognized as important factors determining species distributions. Although effects of positive interactions have often been observed at local scales, much less is known about consequences at larger spatial scales such as metapopulation dynamics. Here, we study nest associations of stream fishes - widespread reproductive mutualism between host (nest-builder) and [...]
Nest-boxes alter the reproductive ecology of urban cavity-nesters in a species-dependent way
Published: 2021-08-25
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Population Biology
To mitigate the shortage of natural breeding sites in cities, nest-boxes are provided for cavity-nesters. However, these are not the breeding sites these animals originally evolved in and optimised their breeding performance to. It thus remains inconclusive if nest-boxes can provide adequate substitutes, ensuring equivalent fitness returns for breeding animals. Additionally, the majority of [...]
Roadkill in a time of pandemic: the analysis of wildlife-vehicle collisions reveals the differential impact of COVID-19 lockdown over mammal assemblages
Published: 2021-07-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Population Biology
Collisions with vehicles are a major anthropogenic cause of mortality for wildlife, with conservation and evolutionary implications. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries worldwide enforced lockdowns which importantly reduced traffic, and therefore had unprecedented consequences for global wildlife populations. We modeled how the two lockdown periods in spring and autumn 2020 influenced [...]
The macroevolutionary consequences of niche construction in microbial metabolism
Published: 2021-05-31
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Population Biology, Systems Biology
Microorganisms display a stunning metabolic diversity. Understanding the origin of this diversity requires understanding how macroevolutionary processes such as innovation and diversification play out in the microbial world. Metabolic networks, which govern microbial resource use, can evolve through different mechanisms, e.g. horizontal gene transfer or de novo evolution of enzymes and pathways. [...]
Quantifying the checks and balances of decentralised governance systems for adaptive carnivore management
Published: 2021-05-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
1. Recovering or threatened carnivore populations are often harvested to minimise their impact on human activities, such as livestock farming or game hunting. Increasingly, harvest quota decisions involve a set of scientific, administrative and political institutions operating at national and sub-national levels whose interactions and collective decision-making aim to increase the legitimacy of [...]
Evolution of pathogen tolerance and emerging infections: A missing experimental paradigm
Published: 2021-04-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Researchers worldwide are repeatedly warning us against future zoonotic diseases resulting from mankind’s insurgence into natural ecosystems. The same zoonotic pathogens that cause severe infections in a human host fail to produce any disease outcome in their natural hosts. What precise features of the immune system enable natural reservoirs to carry these pathogens so efficiently? To understand [...]
Drivers and Consequences of Partial Migration in an Alpine Bird Species
Published: 2021-04-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
1. Partial migration, where a portion of the population migrates between winter and summer (breeding) areas and the rest remains year-round resident, is a common phenomenon across several taxonomic groups. Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain why some individuals migrate while others stay resident, as well as the fitness consequences of the different strategies. Yet, the drivers [...]
Contrasting climate velocity impacts in warm and cool locations show that effects of marine warming are worse in already warmer temperate waters
Published: 2021-04-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Species responses to climate change are often measured at broad spatiotemporal scales, which can miss fine-scale changes that are relevant to conservation and fisheries management. We develop a scale-able geostatistical approach to assess how juvenile and adult fish distributions have been shaped by changes in bottom temperature and dissolved oxygen over a recent decade of warming in the [...]
Deploying Ecological Countermeasures as a Biosecurity Imperative
Published: 2021-03-08
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Immunopathology, International Public Health, Life Sciences, Maternal and Child Health, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Population Biology, Public Health, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Veterinary Microbiology and Immunobiology, Veterinary Pathology and Pathobiology, Zoology
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought biosecurity to the forefront of national security policy. Land use change is a fundamental driver of zoonotic disease outbreaks, yet substantial study is yet required to unravel the mechanisms by which land use-induced spillover operates. Ecological degradation may be the 21st Century’s most overlooked security threat. Within the biosecurity context, we introduce [...]
Do macrophytes act as restaurants for fishes in tropical beaches? An approach using stomach content and prey availability analyses
Published: 2021-03-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Tropical sandy beaches have low primary productivity, thus depend on external food sources. Generally, allochthonous macrophytes, form the basis of these food webs, and also may influence factors such as fish’s abundance, richness, species composition, and biomass. However, the role of macrophytes to the feeding ecology of fishes in tropical sandy beaches is uncertain. We aim to explain if this [...]
CEUTA snowy plover open access data - COMMENTARY
Published: 2021-02-11
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Eberhart-Phillips et al. (2020, Scientific Data 7: 149) recently published a data-paper CeutaOPEN. However, the publication has significant shortcomings: the article does not explain the history nor the context of the project, it did not give credit to the developers of field methodology and data structure, and fails to acknowledge key contributions to the project. We request correcting these [...]
A 25-years population dynamics of sika deer in Kyushu Island, Japan: Estimation using vector autoregressive spatiotemporal model and evaluation of a large-scale management
Published: 2021-02-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Regional management of large herbivore populations is known to be effective in reducing local economic damages and conserving local endemic plants. However, herbivores often move across management areas, and the effect of population management on a large spatial scale is poorly understood, even though it is necessary to use a large-scale approach across multiple management units to implement [...]
Multi-replicated enrichment communities as a model system in microbial ecology
Published: 2021-01-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Recent advances in robotics and affordable genomic sequencing technologies have made it possible to establish and quantitatively track the assembly of enrichment communities in high-throughput. By conducting community assembly experiments in up to thousands of synthetic habitats, where the extrinsic sources of variation among replicates can be controlled, we can now study the reproducibility and [...]
Ecological Countermeasures for Pandemic Prevention: When Ecological Restoration is a Human Health Imperative
Published: 2020-12-06
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Bacteriology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Immunopathology, Integrative Biology, International Public Health, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Parasitology, Pathogenic Microbiology, Population Biology, Public Health, Systems Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Veterinary Microbiology and Immunobiology, Veterinary Pathology and Pathobiology, Zoology
Ecological restoration should be regarded as a public health service. Unfortunately, the lack of quantitative linkages between environmental and human health has limited recognition of these principle. Advent of COVID-19 pandemic provides the impetus for the further discussion. We propose ecological countermeasures as highly targeted, landscape-based interventions to arrest the drivers of land [...]
Evidence for an Allee effect in a declining fur seal population
Published: 2020-11-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology
Allee effects play an important role in the dynamics of many populations and can increase the risk of local extinction. However, some authors have questioned the weight of evidence for Allee effects in wild populations. We therefore exploited a natural experiment provided by two adjacent breeding colonies of contrasting density to investigate the potential for Allee effects in an Antarctic fur [...]