There are 1036 Preprints listed.
Published: 2023-03-27
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Plants harbour an astonishing amount of chemodiversity, i.e., diversity of specialized metabolites, at different scales. For instance, individual plants can produce a large number of different specialized metabolites and individuals in a population can differ in their metabolite composition. Given the ecological and economic importance of plant chemodiversity, it is important to understand how it [...]
Published: 2023-03-27
Subjects: Biological and Physical Anthropology, Other Anthropology, Other Psychology
The role of warfare in human evolution is among the most contentious topics in the evolutionary sciences. The debate is especially heated because many assume that whether our early human ancestors were peaceful or warlike has important implications for modern human nature. Arguments about origins of war often use the behavior of other animal species and recent hunter-gatherers to make inferences [...]
Published: 2023-03-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences
Managing disturbed forests for climate mitigation and biodiversity requires monitoring the carbon (C) cycle consequences of replacing established exotic vegetation with native seedlings. Standard approaches rely on allometric growth equations with unexplored limitations for measuring C changes during restoration. Most plants lack species-specific allometric growth equations, which may perform [...]
Published: 2023-03-21
Subjects: Agriculture, Applied Mathematics, Biogeochemistry, Biology, Dynamic Systems, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Soil Science, Sustainability
Ecosystem management is integral to the future of soils, yet anthropogenic drivers represent a key source of uncertainty in ecosystem models. First- and new-generation soil models formulate many soil pools using first-order decomposition, which tends to generate simpler yet numerous parameters. Systems or complexity theory, developed across various scientific and social fields, may help improve [...]
Published: 2023-03-21
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
Epistasis refers to how genetic interactions between some genetic loci affect phenotypes and fitness. In this study, we propose the concept “structural epistasis” to emphasize the role of the variable physical interactions between molecules located at particular spaces inside the bacterial cell in the emergence of novel phenotypes. The architecture of the bacterial cell (typically a [...]
Published: 2023-03-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Microbial communities that degrade natural polysaccharides are thought to have a hierarchical organization and one-way positive interactions from higher to lower trophic levels. Daniels et al. have recently shown that reciprocal interactions between trophic levels can occur and that these interactions change over the duration of a batch culture.
Published: 2023-03-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Plant Biology
Allelopathy is a common and important stressor that shapes plant communities and can alter soil microbiomes, yet little is known about the direct effects of allelochemical addition on bacterial and fungal communities or the potential for allelochemical-selected microbiomes to mediate plant performance responses, especially in habitats naturally structured by allelopathy. Here we present the first [...]
Published: 2023-03-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences
1. Anthropogenic habitat fragmentation – the breaking up of natural landscapes – is a pervasive threat to biodiversity and ecosystem function worldwide. Fragmentation results in a mosaic of remnant native habitat patches embedded in human-modified habitat known as the “matrix”. By introducing novel environmental conditions in matrix habitats and reducing connectivity of native habitats, [...]
Published: 2023-03-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. How demographic factors lead to variation or change in growth rates can be investigated using life table response experiments (LTRE) based on structured population models. Traditionally, LTREs focused on decomposing the asymptotic growth rate, but more recently decompositions of annual ‘realized’ growth rates have gained in popularity. 2. Realized LTREs have been used particularly to [...]
Published: 2023-03-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. In lotic ecosystems, it is expected higher availability of allochthonous food resources during floods and rainfall events, which may yield a higher consumption of these resources by consumers. However, both the allochthonous input in aquatic ecosystems and seasonality in environmental conditions are locally dependent, thus dietary responses of freshwater consumers to seasonality should also be [...]
Published: 2023-03-15
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Environments have facilitated diversification in human cultures, including folklore. Previous studies show that folklore may transmit folk-zoological knowledge about the local environment. However, it remains unclear whether and how environmental factors are related to animal distributions of folklore. By systematically and quantitatively analyzing large databases in both ecology and [...]
Published: 2023-03-13
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Multivariate Analysis, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Ecological communities are dynamic. These dynamics are influenced by many sources of variation, making it difficult to understand or predict future change. Biotic interactions, and other sources of multi-species dependence, are major contributors. But ecological prediction overwhelmingly focuses on models that treat individual species in isolation. Here, we model the relative importance of [...]
Published: 2023-03-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Prophages, latent viral elements residing in bacterial genomes impact bacterial ecology and evolution in diverse ways. Do these prophage-mediated effects extend beyond the prophage-bacterium relationship? Here, I summarize the latest advances exploring how the impact of prophages are transmitted through multiple levels with potential impacts on ecosystem stability and functioning. The diverse [...]
Published: 2023-03-07
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ecogeographical rules, describing common trends in animal form across space and time, have provided key insights into the primary factors driving species persistence on our planet. Among the most well-known ecogeographical rules are James’ rule (an intraspecific variant of Bergmann’s rule) and Allen’s rule, with each correlating ambient temperature to the size and shape of endotherms within a [...]
Published: 2023-03-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Telomeres are non-coding DNA sequences located at the end of linear chromosomes, protecting genome integrity. In numerous taxa, telomeres shorten with age and telomere length (TL) is positively correlated with longevity. Moreover, TL is also affected by environmental stressors and/or resource-demanding situations particularly during early-life. Thus, TL has been used as a physiological marker of [...]