Preprints
There are 2238 Preprints listed.
Agricultural Beneficial Management Practices: A Synthesis of Co-benefits, Tradeoffs, and Co-costs between Crop Yield and Non-provisioning Ecosystem Services
Published: 2020-12-17
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Economics, Agriculture, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Although agricultural “best (or beneficial) management practices” (BMPs) first emerged to mitigate agro-environmental resource challenges, they may also enhance ‘non-provisioning’ ecosystem services. The enthusiasm for adopting BMPs partially depends on evidence that doing so will lead to agro-environmental benefits while not substantially reducing crop productivity or farmer income. We survey [...]
Students of color speak on racial equity in environmental sustainability
Published: 2020-12-17
Subjects: Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Race and Ethnicity, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology, Sustainability
This is a preprint of an article published in Nature Sustainability. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00759-7. Racial and ethnic diversity in environmental sustainability advances social equity and innovation solving social-ecological crises. Yet, Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) remain underrepresented in sustainability [...]
Computer vision, machine learning, and the promise of phenomics in ecology and evolutionary biology
Published: 2020-12-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
For centuries, ecologists and evolutionary biologists have used images such as drawings, paintings and photographs to record and quantify the shapes and patterns of life. With the advent of digital imaging, biologists continue to collect image data at an ever-increasing rate. This immense body of data provides insight into a wide range of biological phenomena, including phenotypic trait [...]
Large contribution of recent photosynthate to soil respiration in Dipterocarpaceae-dominated tropical forest revealed by girdling
Published: 2020-12-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
• Tropical forests are the most productive terrestrial ecosystem, fixing around 41 Pg of carbon from the atmosphere each year. A substantial portion of this carbon is allocated belowground to roots and root-associated microorganisms. However, there have been very few empirical studies on the dynamics of this transfer, especially in tropical forests where the response is mediated by high plant [...]
Ecological and environmental context shape the differential effects of a facilitator in its native and invaded ranges
Published: 2020-12-14
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Non-indigenous species often exhibit disproportionately strong negative effects in their introduced range compared to their native range, and much research has been devoted to understanding the role of shared evolutionary history, or lack thereof, in driving these differences. Less studied is whether non-indigenous species, particularly those that are important as facilitators in their native [...]
Visual and olfactory cues of predation affect body and brain growth in the guppy
Published: 2020-12-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
1. Phenotypic plasticity requires animals to acquire reliable environmental information. When multiple sources of information agree, cues should be perceived as reliable and induce a relatively strong response. Conversely, where stimuli conflict, animals must weigh the accuracy of the sources of information and responses should be reduced. 2. Availability of reliable information is often [...]
ausplotsR: An R package for rapid extraction and analysis of vegetation and soil data collected by Australia’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Published: 2020-12-14
Subjects: Biostatistics, Botany, Life Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Statistics and Probability
The Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), Australia’s national land ecosystem monitoring program, measures critical environmental attributes from local to continental scale and generates quality data for research and land management. Since 2011, TERN has performed standardised field surveys and sampling across a national plot network. At each plot, TERN records vegetation structure, [...]
Beta and phylogenetic diversities tell complementary stories about ecological networks biogeography
Published: 2020-12-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The beta-diversity of interactions between communities does not necessarily correspond to the differences related to their species composition because interactions show greater variability than species co-occurrence. Additionally, the structure of species interaction networks can itself vary over spatial gradients, thereby adding constraints on the dissimilarity of communities in space. We used [...]
Concepts and applications in functional diversity
Published: 2020-12-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The use of functional analyses in ecology has grown exponentially over the past two decades, broadening our understanding of biological diversity and its change across space and time. Virtually all ecological sub-disciplines recognize the critical value of looking at species and communities from a functional perspective, and this has led to a proliferation of methods for estimating contrasting [...]
Space-for-time inferences about range-edge dynamics of tree species can be influenced by sampling biases
Published: 2020-12-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Differences between the distributions of tree saplings and adults in geographic or niche space have been used to infer climate change effects on tree range dynamics. Previous studies have reported narrower latitudinal or climatic niche ranges of juvenile trees compared to adults, concluding that tree ranges are contracting, contradicting climate-based predictions. However, more comprehensive [...]
Does degeneration or genetic conflict shape gene content on UV sex chromosomes?
Published: 2020-12-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Studies of sex chromosomes have played a central role in understanding the consequences of suppressed recombination and sex-specific inheritance among several genomic phenomena. However, we argue that these efforts will benefit from a more rigorous examination of haploid UV sex chromosome systems, in which both the female-limited (U) and male-limited (V) experience suppressed recombination and [...]
Management effectiveness positively influences forest conservation outcomes in protected areas in Mexico
Published: 2020-12-07
Subjects: Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Understanding the factors that drive protected area outcomes is critical to increase the success of global conservation efforts. Until recently, our understanding of the influence of management effectiveness has been restricted by the limited availability of standardized management data and study design limitations of prior evaluations. Here we use a quasi-experimental matching approach to test [...]
Ecological Countermeasures for Pandemic Prevention: When Ecological Restoration is a Human Health Imperative
Published: 2020-12-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Bacteriology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Immunopathology, Integrative Biology, International Public Health, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Parasitology, Pathogenic Microbiology, Population Biology, Public Health, Systems Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Veterinary Microbiology and Immunobiology, Veterinary Pathology and Pathobiology, Zoology
Ecological restoration should be regarded as a public health service. Unfortunately, the lack of quantitative linkages between environmental and human health has limited recognition of these principle. Advent of COVID-19 pandemic provides the impetus for the further discussion. We propose ecological countermeasures as highly targeted, landscape-based interventions to arrest the drivers of land [...]
Experimentally testing the response of feral cats and their prey to poison baiting
Published: 2020-12-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Feral cats Felis catus have caused the decline and extinction of many species worldwide, particularly on islands and in Australia where native species are generally naïve to the threat of this introduced predator. Effectively reducing cat populations to protect wildlife is challenging because cats have a cryptic nature, high reproductive rate and strong reinvasion ability. We experimentally [...]
All together now: Limitations and recommendations for the simultaneous analysis of all eukaryotic soil sequences
Published: 2020-12-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The soil environment contains a large, but historically underexplored reservoir of biodiversity. While sequencing of prokaryotic marker genes has become commonplace for the discovery and characterization of soil bacteria and archaea, this approach has been increasingly applied to sequencing eukaryotic marker genes to characterize the diversity of soil eukaryotes. However, understanding the [...]