Preprints
There are 1692 Preprints listed.
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of The Agulhas
Published: 2024-07-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Agulhas is a regional ecosystem subgroup (Level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Agulhas Bank and KwaZulu-Natal that extend along the South African eastern coastline. The extent of the Agulhas mangroves in 2023 is 23.0 km2, representing 0.02% of the global mangrove area. Mangroves in this province are limited to 31 estuaries [...]
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 defenses shape ecosystems by orchestrating interactions between species and promoting specialization on toxic prey. Many toxins exist in highly biodiverse tropical ecosystems, sometimes in the same prey, imposing challenges for studying toxin resistance and requiring the development of new models. Royal ground snakes (Erythrolamprus) play a significant but understudied role as predators [...]
Traits, threats, and popularity explain extinction risk of birds globally
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
As the biodiversity crisis deepens, understanding extinction risk is essential for conserving at-risk species and triaging those potentially overlooked. Extinction risk is often estimated with traits (e.g. larger species are more vulnerable) without considering the context of threats or human bias in the listing process (e.g. more popular species are more or less likely to be listed). On the [...]
Short-sighted evolution of virulence for invasive gut microbes: from hypothesis to tests.
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
Why microbes harm their hosts is a fundamental question in evolutionary biology with broad relevance to our understanding of infectious diseases. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this "evolution of virulence." In this perspective, we re-examine one of these hypotheses in the specific context of the human gut microbiome, namely short-sighted evolution. According to the [...]
Match or mismatch: Tokay geckos adjust their behaviour to familiar and unfamiliar handlers but according to the context
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Animals need to distinguish among different con- and heterospecific individuals to be able to adjust behaviour appropriately. Behavioural responses towards familiar individuals might vary based on context in which they are encountered. However, such context dependent responses, while beneficial in the wild, can impact experimental results, increase error, decrease reproducibility and threaten [...]
Does biogeographic history shape spatial patterns of intraspecific variation in personality, performance and morphology?
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Addressing how individual variation within populations drives the evolution of biodiversity patterns is a major challenge in ecology and evolutionary biology. Historical biogeographic processes have had dramatic consequences on the structure of biodiversity. However, while the interplay between historical processes and genotypic diversity within populations has been widely investigated, the [...]
Deciphering probabilistic species interaction networks
Published: 2024-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Representing species interactions probabilistically (how likely are they to occur?) as opposed to deterministically (are they occurring?) conveys uncertainties in our knowledge of interactions and information on their variability. The sources of uncertainty captured by interaction probabilities depend on the method used to evaluate them: uncertainty of predictive models, subjective assessment of [...]
Temperature-dependent differences in male and female life history responses to a period of food limitation during development
Published: 2024-07-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
With climate change, animals face both rising temperatures and more variable food availability. Many species have evolved an adaptative response to historic variation in food availability: they grow faster after a period of diet restriction (“compensatory growth”). However, higher temperatures may reduce the capacity for compensatory growth in ectotherms because individuals require more resources [...]
Emergent relationships between the functional diversity of marine zooplankton and ecosystem functioning in the global ocean
Published: 2024-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Marine Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Copepods are a major group of the mesozooplankton and thus a key part of marine ecosystems worldwide. Their fitness and life strategies are determined by their functional traits which allow different species to exploit various ecological niches. The range of functional traits expressed in a community define its functional diversity (FD), which can be used to investigate how communities utilize [...]
Bimodal seasonal activity of moths and elevation, weather and land use as drivers of their diversity
Published: 2024-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Moths are an important part of terrestrial insect diversity and contribute substantially to ecosys-tem functioning. Yet, how their activity varies with the season and how different biotic and abiotic factors (elevation, weather, land use) are simultaneously linked to moth community characteristics are still poorly understood. We analysed a vast moth community dataset from Switzerland collected by [...]
Agricultural land use and reproductive behaviour constrain responses to summer thermal stress in a large herbivore
Published: 2024-07-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Agricultural land use and climate change are major global threats to terrestrial biodiversity. However, their interactive effects on synanthropic species are only recently being addressed. Behavioural plasticity is the most likely candidate mechanism for coping with rapid environmental change, yet behavioural adjustments may be insufficient when multiple anthropogenic pressures, such as human [...]
Biodiversity research in India: a bibliometric overview
Published: 2024-07-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
As one of the ‘megadiverse’ countries, biodiversity research in India is not only important, specifically for India, but also for the world. To investigate the condition of biodiversity in the Indian academic literature, bibliometric analysis was employed. The Web of Science Core Collection provided data (2000–2023). Out of a preliminary set of 1090 publications, 223 were finalised with a focus [...]
Disentangling variational bias: the roles of development, mutation and selection
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The extraordinary diversity and adaptive fit of organisms to their environment depends fundamentally on the availability of variation. While many evolutionary studies assume that random mutations produce isotropic phenotypic variation, the distribution of variation available to natural selection is more restricted, as the distribution of phenotypic variation is affected by a range of factors in [...]
Repeatability and intra-class correlations from time-to-event data: towards a standardized approach
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Many biological features are expressed as “time-to-event” traits, such as time to first reproduction or response to some stimulus. The analysis of these traits frequently produces right-censored data in cases where no event has occurred within a certain timeframe. The Cox proportional hazards (CPH) model, a type of survival analysis, accounts for censored data by estimating the hazard of an event [...]
Snow persistence influences vegetation metrics central to Arctic greening analyses
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring
Satellite imagery is critical for understanding land-surface change in the rapidly warming Arctic. Since the 1980s, studies have found positive trends in the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from satellite imagery over the Arctic - commonly referred to as ‘Arctic greening’ and assumed to represent increased vegetation productivity. However, greening analyses use satellite [...]