Preprints
There are 1954 Preprints listed.
Temporal stability in songs across the breeding range of the Mourning Warbler may be due to learning fidelity and transmission biases
Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology
We found a stable pattern of geographic variation in songs across the breeding range of the Mourning Warbler over a 36 yr period. The Western, Eastern, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland regiolects found in 2005-2009 also existed from 1983-1988 and 2017-2019. Each regiolect contained a pool of syllables that were unique and different from the other regiolects. The primary syllable types that defined [...]
Anthropogenic lighting affects moth abundance and diversity differently across ecosystems
Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Light pollution poses a significant threat to nocturnal insects, yet our understanding of how insects are affected by lighting across ecosystems is limited. The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in light-induced attraction in abundance and diversity of moths in forest and grassland ecosystems. This study presents a novel comparison of moth attraction between these ecosystems [...]
Density dependence impacts our understanding of population resilience
Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Current metrics of demographic resilience (e.g., resistance, recovery) summarize the potential responses of populations to the frequent, varied disturbances that ecological systems experience. Much of the application of these metrics has focused on the potential response of time-invariant, density-independent structured population models to hypothetical disturbances. Here, we examine such [...]
Freshwater fish functional diversity shows diverse responses to human activities, but consistently declines in the tropics
Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Freshwater environments are intertwined with human activities and the consequence has been environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. Fish provide key ecological and economic benefits, and fish abundance and diversity can be affected by human activities resulting in functional diversity (FD) changes that might scale up to ecosystem impacts. Changes in FD can be expressed by quantifying its [...]
Spatial microbial flows: hidden fluxes of detritus, diversity, and function in meta-ecosystems
Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences
Ecosystems are linked by spatial flows of energy, nutrients, and organisms across ecosystem boundaries, forming a meta-ecosystem. The study of spatial flows has typically focused on fluxes of materials (e.g., nutrients or organic matter) and conspicuous organisms (e.g., fish or insects). However, recent evidence from field studies has suggested that numerically significant spatial flows of [...]
Seedlings of Temperate Tree Species Show Plastic Responses to Water Deficit and Heat Stress, But They Do Not Prevent Decline in Growth
Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Species response to climate change is difficult to predict because warming involves the interaction of multiple stressors whose effects are simultaneous and therefore difficult to disentangle. To address this gap, I studied the effect of global warming on plant performance and functional traits by exposing seedlings from five temperate tree species with distinct life histories to water deficit [...]
The importance of diversity for ecosystem functioning increases in heterogeneous environments
Published: 2024-09-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aim Significant progress has been made in understanding the links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in both experimental and real-world ecosystems. Yet, we have limited understanding to which extent biodiversity affects ecosystem functioning in natural heterogeneous environments and whether changes in ecosystem functions are related to changes in species richness and/or turnover. [...]
mpmsim: An R package for simulating matrix population models
Published: 2024-09-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Matrix population models (MPMs) are widely used in ecology and evolution to explore population dynamics, including assessing management impacts and extinction risk. In comparative studies, MPMs can be used to test life history theory or investigate macro-evolutionary patterns in demographic traits. 2. Simulated MPMs can help researchers explore the effects of life cycle structure, vital rate [...]
Copy-paste augmentation improves automatic species identification in camera trap images
Published: 2024-09-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Effective conservation requires effective biodiversity monitoring. The pace of global biodiversity change far outstrips the ability of manual fieldwork to monitor it. Therefore, technological solutions, like camera traps, have emerged as a crucial way to meet biodiversity monitoring needs. Camera traps produce vast amounts of data and so AI is increasingly used to label images with species [...]
How can we make conferences more inclusive? Lessons from the International Ethological Congress
Published: 2024-09-24
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Despite growing awareness of the importance of researcher diversity, barriers to inclusion and equity persist in science and at academic conferences. As hosts of the 37th International Ethological Congress, “Behaviour 2023”, we studied equity, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) issues using observational and experimental behavioural data collected during question and answer (Q&A) sessions in [...]
Mega Rice (Oryza sativa) Varieties of Bangladesh: A Comprehensive Review of the Breeding History and Production of BR11, BRRI dhan28, and BRRI dhan29
Published: 2024-09-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Prior to the Green Revolution in the 1960s, rice cultivation in Bangladesh primarily relied on local landraces, which were characterized by low yield potential and undesirable agronomic traits. However, the establishment of the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) in 1970 marked a significant turning point, leading to steady advancements in rice production. To date, BRRI has developed 113 [...]
Phylogenetic Diversity vs H-Index – does genetics or culture lead conservation research?
Published: 2024-09-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
With so many species in decline it is difficult to know where conservation effort and funding should be dedicated. A common prioritization argument is species uniqueness and phylogenetic diversity, where those with unique evolutionary history are thought to be especially valuable. However, despite frequent calls for better prioritization, research interest is often idiosyncratic, pragmatic, and [...]
Do environmental fluctuations during development affect trait variation? An experimental test with salinity
Published: 2024-09-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is a driver of extinction, with extreme events occurring more frequently. It increases both the amount and variability in environmental stress that organisms experience. In novel environments, greater intra-specific trait variation increases the opportunity for natural selection as individuals with fortuitously advantageous trait expression may thrive. Many studies focus on changes [...]
Wild vs. domestic ungulate ecosystem impacts: understanding functional differences requires greater focus on mechanisms
Published: 2024-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ungulates play vital roles in ecological systems, shaping plant biomass and diversity via herbivory and impacting soil properties through trampling and nutrient deposition. As ungulate communities fluctuate across the globe, the extent to which wild ungulates and domestic livestock can play similar ecological roles is an increasingly vital - and fraught - question. Here, we synthesized the [...]
Developing Machine Learning Applications for Population Genetic Inference: Ensuring Precise Terminology and Robust Implementation
Published: 2024-09-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Machine learning applications for population genetic inference are emerging due to their potential to leverage large-scale genomic datasets, offering insights that traditional statistical methods may overlook. However, I have identified certain recurring issues. First, there is sometimes confusion between power and recall, and between the false discovery rate and one minus precision. These terms [...]