Preprints
There are 2279 Preprints listed.
Soil biota impacts on plant access to different water pools in soil
Published: 2022-02-22
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Aims: Soil water availability depends on the capacity of soil pores to hold it via physical forces creating gradient of availability from tightly bound water to highly mobile water. Abiotic factors directly affect the size of these pools and plant access to them. Biotic factors influence plant-soil-water relations and possibly affect soil properties and plant access to different water pools. [...]
Portrayal of the nitrogen debate in Dutch newspapers
Published: 2022-02-21
Subjects: Communication, Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How sustainability challenges are relayed to the public is paramount to tackling such issues timely. However, there is still a lot to learn about the communication system between sustainability experts and the public. We looked at how Dutch newspapers portrayed the Dutch nitrogen debate that has been going on since 2019. 160 articles from four Dutch national daily newspapers were analyzed for [...]
Evolution of social organization: phylogenetic analyses of ecology and sexual selection in weavers
Published: 2022-02-20
Subjects: Animal Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Crook published a landmark study on the social organization of weavers (or weaverbirds, family Ploceidae) that contributed to the emergence of sociobiology, behavioral ecology, and phylogenetic comparative methods. By comparing ecology, spatial distribution, and mating systems, Crook suggested that the spatial distribution of food resources and breeding habitats influence weaver aggregation, both [...]
Systemic racism alters wildlife genetic diversity
Published: 2022-02-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Humans are the defining feature of urban ecosystems. In the United States, systemic racism has had lasting effects on the structure of cities, specifically due to government-mandated “redlining” policies that produced racially segregated neighborhoods that persist today. However, it is not known whether varying habitat structure and natural resource availability associated with racial segregation [...]
Drivers of community assembly change during succession in wood-decomposing insect communities
Published: 2022-02-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
1. The patterns of successional change of decomposer communities is unique in that resource availability predictably decreases as decomposition proceeds. Saproxylic (i.e., deadwood-dependent) beetles are a highly diverse and functionally important decomposer group, and their community composition is affected by both deadwood characteristics and other environmental factors. Understanding how [...]
Improving species conservation plans under IUCN’s One Plan Approach using quantitative genetic methods
Published: 2022-02-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Human activities are resulting in altered environmental conditions that are impacting the demography and evolution of species globally. If we wish to prevent anthropogenic extinction and extirpation, we need to improve our ability to restore wild populations. Ex situ populations can be an important tool for species conservation. However, it is difficult to prevent deviations from an optimal [...]
Graph embedding and transfer learning can help predict potential species interaction networks despite data limitations
Published: 2022-02-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Metawebs (networks of potential interactions within a species pool) are a powerful abstraction to understand how large-scale species interaction networks are structured. Because metawebs are typically expressed at large spatial and taxonomic scales, assembling them is a tedious and costly process; predictive methods can help circumvent the limitations in data deficiencies, by providing a first [...]
Past and future uses of text mining in ecology & evolution
Published: 2022-02-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Ecology and evolutionary biology, like other scientific fields, are experiencing an exponential growth of academic manuscripts. As domain knowledge accumulates, scientists will need new computational approaches for identifying relevant literature to read and include in formal literature reviews and meta-analyses. Importantly, these approaches can also facilitate automated, large-scale data [...]
Density dependence and disease dynamics: moving towards a predictive framework
Published: 2022-02-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
High population density is thought to exacerbate parasite exposure rates, leading to increased transmission and greater disease burdens. Different types of interactions exhibit different relationships with density, and therefore so do parasites that are spread by these interactions. Epidemiological models often assume a given density-transmission relationship, and the validity of this assumption [...]
Behavioural ecology at the spatial-social interface
Published: 2022-02-11
Subjects: Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Spatial and social behaviour are fundamental aspects of an animal’s biology, and the social and spatial environments are indelibly linked through mutual causes and shared consequences. Behavioural variation at the “spatial-social interface”, which we define as the intersection of social and spatial aspects of individuals’ phenotypes and environments, has implications for ecological and [...]
Integrated distribution modelling to estimate the national population size of an alpine bird
Published: 2022-02-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
1) Estimates of species’ population abundances have important ramifications for conservation decision-making. Conservation practice, however, often has to rely on indices of relative abundance rather than absolute estimates. Attempts to estimate large-scale abundance estimates of species are limited by both the availability of data and statistical challenges. New opportunities are, however, [...]
Intergenerational effects of overfeeding on aversive learning in zebrafish (Danio rerio)
Published: 2022-02-07
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
The obesity epidemic is among the most serious and rapidly growing public health challenges of the 21st century. This rapid increase is concerning as obesity appears to negatively impact cognition and behaviour. Furthermore, some studies suggest that this negative effect could be carried across generations from both mothers and fathers although evidence is not consistent. Here, we attempt to [...]
The effects of an obesogenic diet on behaviour and cognition in zebrafish (Danio rerio): traits average, variability, repeatability, and behavioural syndromes
Published: 2022-02-07
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
The obesity epidemic, largely driven by the accessibility of ultra-processed high-energy foods, is one of the most pressing public health challenges of the 21st century. Consequently, there is increasing concern about the impacts of diet-induced obesity on behaviour and cognition. While research on this matter continues, to date, no study has explicitly investigated the effect of obesogenic diet [...]
Mismatch between IUCN range maps and species interactions data illustrated using the Serengeti food web
Published: 2022-02-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Background. Range maps are a useful tool to describe the spatial distribution of species. However, they need to be used with caution, as they essentially represent a rough approximation of a species’ suitable habitats. When stacked together, the resulting communities in each grid cell may not always be realistic, especially when species interactions are taken into account. Here we show the extent [...]
Origins and evolution of biological novelty
Published: 2022-02-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Understanding the origins and impacts of novel traits has been a perennial interest in many realms of ecology and evolutionary biology. Here, we build on previous evolutionary and philosophical treatments of the subject to encompass novelties across biological scales and eco-evolutionary perspectives. By defining novelties as new features at one biological scale that have emergent effects at [...]