Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Other Life Sciences
For the few, not the many: local economic conditions constrain the large-scale management of invasive mosquitoes
Published: 2022-01-06
Subjects: Economics, Entomology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Other Medicine and Health Sciences, Public Economics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Systems Biology
Invasive mosquitoes are an emerging ecological and sanitary issue. Many factors have been suggested as drivers or barriers to their control, still no study quantified their influence over mosquito management by local authorities, nor their interplay with local economic conditions. We assessed how multiple environmental, sanitary, and socio-economic factors affected the engagement of [...]
Direct Economic Inputs from Internationally Funded Science Projects to the Abaco Islands, The Bahamas
Published: 2021-12-06
Subjects: Communication, Environmental Studies, International and Intercultural Communication, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
International expenditures for scientific research are important for small island developing nations, especially for those local communities that directly support research activities. We used the Abaco Islands, The Bahamas, as a case study to quantify the direct monetary inputs to a local economy via internationally-funded scientific research. We found that over two years the external monetary [...]
Examining the Associations Between Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status and the Potential Distribution of Four Urban Ecosystem Services in Rochester, NY
Published: 2021-08-17
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
As populations and the total area of impervious surfaces continue to grow in developed areas, planners and policy makers must consider how local ecological resources can be utilized to meet the needs and develop climate resilient and sustainable cities. Urban green spaces (UGS) have been identified as critical resources in improving the climate resiliency of cities and the quality of life for [...]
Men and wolves: are anthropogenic causes the main driver of wolf mortality in human-dominated landscapes in Italy?
Published: 2021-08-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
Over the last 40 years the gray wolf (Canis lupus) re-colonized its historical range in Italy increasing human-predator interactions. However, temporal and spatial trends in wolf mortality, including direct and indirect persecution, were never summarized. This study aims to fill this gap by focusing on the situation of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna regions, believed to host a significant proportion [...]
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 [...]
Potential bioavailability of representative pyrogenic organic matter compounds in comparison to natural dissolved organic matter pools
Published: 2021-04-27
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Pyrogenic organic matter (PyOM) from wildfires impacts river corridors globally and is widely regarded as resistant to biological degradation. Though recent work suggests PyOM may be more bioavailable than historically perceived, estimating bioavailability across its chemical spectrum remains elusive. To address this knowledge gap, we assessed potential bioavailability of representative PyOM [...]
El histórico Acuerdo de Escazú: una oportunidad para integrar democracia, derechos humanos y conservación transfronteriza
Published: 2021-04-14
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
América Latina y el Caribe (ALC) es una de las regiones con mayor biodiversidad, sin embargo, esta se encuentra amenazada por la sobreexplotación de recursos naturales y por conflictos sociales internos. En el 2018, 33 países de la región ALC fueron invitados a firmar y ratificar el histórico Acuerdo de Escazú, el cual es el primer acuerdo de carácter vinculante que integra de manera explícita [...]
Temporal Change Detection Analysis of Monroe County, NY tree cover from 2009 to 2017
Published: 2021-03-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Forests provide many ecosystem services which are enjoyed by nearby residing communities. This includes pollution and flood mitigation, carbon sequestration, oxygen production, food, fuel, education, recreation, and aesthetics. These ecosystem services also come from urban and suburban forests. Urban ecosystems, specifically urban green spaces services have been noted to improve human health [...]
Combining surveys and on-line searching volumes to analyze public awareness about invasive alien species: a case study with the invasive Asian yellow-legged hornet (Vespa velutina) in Italy
Published: 2020-11-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
The Asian yellow-legged hornet (Vespa velutina) has been invading Italy since 2013, and it was subjected to management projects aimed at counteracting its spread and raising awareness about its impacts. In autumn 2019, we administered an on-line questionnaire to a convenience sample of 358 beekeepers in Italy. The questionnaire asked them about their sources of information about V. velutina, [...]
Participatory mapping of aquatic invasive species: a demonstration in a coastal lagoon
Published: 2020-10-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Aquatic Invasive species (AIS) are a growing driver of change across marine and freshwater ecosystems but spatially-explicit information is seldom available for supporting management actions and decision making. Here we conceived and tested a new participatory method to map the distribution of three invasive species (Callinectes sapidus, Procambarus clarkii and Oreochromis niloticus) in the [...]
Including Rural America in academic conservation science
Published: 2020-10-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Law, Law, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Entrenched political partisanship in the United States has placed long-standing constraints on conservation policy and climate change legislation. These barriers persist, demanding fresh insights into the ways that conservation has become a victim of political polarization, and pathways for encouraging bipartisan support for climate change and other U.S. conservation policies. We suggest three [...]
Testing character-evolution models in phylogenetic paleobiology: a case study with Cambrian echinoderms
Published: 2020-08-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Macroevolutionary inference has historically been treated as a two-step process, involving the inference of a phylogenetic tree, and then inference of a macroevolutionary model using that tree. Newer models, such as the fossilized birth-death model, blend the two steps. These methods make more complete use of fossils than the previous generation of Bayesian phylogenetic models. They also involve [...]
Online conferences for better learning
Published: 2020-06-23
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Conferences provide an invaluable set of opportunities for professional development. Online, virtual, and distributed conferences do not necessarily mean less opportunity for growth and innovation in science but varied and novel options for communicating the scientific process. Open science and many existing tools and structures are in place in the practice of contemporary ecology and evolution [...]
A guide to using the Internet to monitor and quantify the wildlife trade
Published: 2020-05-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
The unrivalled growth in e-commerce of animals and plants presents an unprecedented opportunity to monitor wildlife trade to inform conservation, biosecurity, and law enforcement. Using the Internet to quantify the scale of the wildlife trade (volume, frequency) is a relatively recent and rapidly developing approach, which currently lacks an accessible framework for locating relevant websites and [...]
COVID-19 has led to a global increase in web searches for bats: a risk for conservation ?
Published: 2020-04-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19 pandemic, is genomically similar to a SARS-like beta-coronavirus found in Chinese rhinolophids. This evolutionary relationship impressed global media, which emphasized bats as key actors in the spillover during the pandemic outbreak. In this study we highlight qualitative and quantitative changes about bats in the media coverage, and Internet search [...]