There are 1092 Preprints listed.
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Large carnivores such as the jaguar (Panthera onca) are particularly susceptible to population decline and local extinction as a result of habitat loss. Here, we report on the long-term monitoring of a local jaguar population in a mixed land use area in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia from March 2017 to December 2019. We recorded 15 jaguar individuals and four reproduction events (five offspring [...]
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Numerous studies have demonstrated that individuals within a species will consistently vary between one another in behavioural traits. A prominent adaptive explanation for such ‘animal personalities’ relates to an individual’s intrinsic state driving and/or being driven by behaviour. Telomeres – the protective caps at the end of chromosomes which exist in most organisms – have been proposed as a [...]
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
In the last decade and a half, advances in genetic sequencing technologies have revolutionized systematics, transforming the field as studying morphological characters; a few genetic markers have given way to genomic data sets in the phylogenomic era. A plethora of molecular phylogenetic studies on many taxonomic groups have come about, converging on, or refuting prevailing morphology or [...]
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Psychology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Extracting data from studies is the norm in meta-analyses, enabling researchers to generate effect sizes when raw data are otherwise not available. While there has been a general push for increased reproducibility throughout the many facets of meta-analysis, the transparency and reproducibility of the data extraction phase are still lagging be- hind. This particular meta-analytic facet is [...]
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genomics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Population Biology
Genetic data shows that cryptic hybrids are more common than previously thought and that hybridization and introgression are widespread processes in nature. Regardless of this, studies on hybridization are scarce for the highly speciose Bulbophyllum. The genus presents more than 2,200 species and many examples of recent radiations, in which hybridization is expected to be frequent. Currently, [...]
Published: 2022-12-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
There is a growing interest in the effects of noise pollution on aquatic ecosystems. To date, these works mainly focus on hearing species, especially fish and mammals. Therefore, species from lower trophic level, despite their ecological importance are less studied. Within these invertebrates, studies on noise effects on holozooplankton are very rare. Previous works demonstrate that they could [...]
Published: 2022-12-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Carbon crediting and land offsets for biodiversity protection are implemented to tackle the challenges of increasing greenhouse gas emissions and loss of global biodiversity, but these two mechanisms are not optimal when considered separately. Focusing solely on carbon capture – the primary goal of most carbon-focused offsetting commitments – often results in the establishment of non-native, [...]
Published: 2022-12-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Most species belong to ecological communities where their interactions give rise to emergent community-level properties, such as diversity and productivity. Understanding and predicting how these properties change over time has been a major goal in ecology, with important practical implications for sustainability and human health. Less attention has been paid to the fact that community-level [...]
Published: 2022-12-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
In polygynous species, most dominant males sire a disproportionate number of offspring and dominance rank is assumed to be age dependent. Yet, extreme inter-male competition and high early male mortality prevent most males from reaching a social status that could guaranty a high reproductive success. Alternative reproductive tactics may have evolved to maximize male reproductive success despite a [...]
Published: 2022-12-10
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
In the field of observational and experimental natural sciences (as is the case for microbiology), recent decades have been overinfluenced by overwhelming technological advances, and the space of abstraction has been frequently disdained. However, the predictable future of biological sciences should necessarily recover the synthetic dimension of “natural philosophy”. We should understand the [...]
Published: 2022-12-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Although much of suburban Sydney is heavily urbanised, there are also many pockets of remnant vegetation scattered throughout the region, even in the most built-up areas. From 2020-2022 I conducted a comprehensive biodiversity survey of Wategora Reserve, and the riparian vegetation adjacent to Everley Park directly south of the reserve, a small fragment of remnant bushland on the western bank of [...]
Published: 2022-12-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
To evaluate the United Nation’s preliminary post-2020 sustainable goals on protecting high levels of genetic diversity per species, Exposito-Alonso et al. (2022) proposed a new framework to predict a species’ loss of genetic diversity given its loss of habitat area. This method, called the mutations-area relationship (MAR), is analogous to the species-area relationship (SAR), often used to assess [...]
Published: 2022-12-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Tropical montane bird species may be vulnerable to climate change as they often have narrow elevational ranges that are expected to shift upslope in response to increasing temperatures. If highland endemics near mountaintops are forced upslope, these species may be especially at risk of local extinction. We investigated the elevational ranges of two species of montane cloud forest warblers, the [...]
Published: 2022-12-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
A preference for mating with conspecifics over heterospecifics is fundamental to the maintenance of species diversity in sexually reproducing organisms. This type of assortative mating is often stronger between closely related sympatric species as compared to allopatric species, resulting from processes such as reinforcement or differential fusion. In animals, this pattern has been demonstrated [...]
Published: 2022-12-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Sexually selected phenotypes are key to understanding population and eco-evolutionary dynamics since the expression of these traits is tightly linked to reproduction and population viability. Parasites are major agents of selection that alter both phenotypic expression and fitness. However, the carry-over effects of parasites in early life in selection on phenotypes expressed later in life are [...]