Preprints
There are 2502 Preprints listed.
ausplotsR: An R package for rapid extraction and analysis of vegetation and soil data collected by Australia’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Published: 2020-12-15
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: 2020-12-12
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: 2020-12-12
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: 2020-12-08
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: 2020-12-08
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: 2020-12-06
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: 2020-12-04
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 [...]
Qualitative and quantitative methods show stability in patterns of Cepaea nemoralis shell polymorphism in the Pyrenees over five decades
Published: 2020-12-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
One of the emerging strengths of working with the land snail genus Cepaea is that historical collections can be compared against modern day samples, for instance to understand the impact of changing climate and habitat upon shell morph frequencies. However, one potential limitation is that prior studies scored shell ground colour by eye, usually in the field, into three discrete colours yellow, [...]
Evidence for an Allee effect in a declining fur seal population
Published: 2020-11-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology
Allee effects play an important role in the dynamics of many populations and can increase the risk of local extinction. However, some authors have questioned the weight of evidence for Allee effects in wild populations. We therefore exploited a natural experiment provided by two adjacent breeding colonies of contrasting density to investigate the potential for Allee effects in an Antarctic fur [...]
Adaptive ageing theory of faster adaptation and inconsistency of the conventional selection shadow evolutionary theory of ageing.
Published: 2020-11-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Selection shadow has been the conventional theory of evolution of ageing for decades. I argue that selection shadow is merely a phenomenon by which deleterious mutation will be inevitably passed on if they manifest only after mating. However, to explain prevalence of ageing, the authors of the conventional theory erroneously equated passing on and persistence by interpreting selection shadow as [...]
Ten considerations for conservation policy makers for the post-COVID-19 transition
Published: 2020-11-27
Subjects: Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Public health and safety concerns around the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic have greatly changed human behaviour. Such shifts in behaviours including travel patterns, consumerism, and energy use, are variously impacting biodiversity during the human-dominated geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. Indeed, the dramatic reduction in human mobility and activity has been [...]
The Threshold of Ecosystem Services Assessment in Urban Forest for Learning Outcomes in Higher Education: Mahidol University (Kanchanaburi Campus)
Published: 2020-11-27
Subjects: Education, Higher Education
My research emphasizes involvement the relation linked biodiversity (focuses mammals and birds) and ecosystem services which the first step important before integrating into the part other of ecosystem services assessment. Its essence development knowledge and competency (ability and mentality) usefully support enhancing problem-solving in a facet challenge inevitable of sustainable development [...]
Mobilising molluscan models and genomes in biology
Published: 2020-11-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Life Sciences, Life Sciences
Molluscs are amongst the most ancient, diverse, and important of all animal taxa. Even so, no individual mollusc species has emerged as a broadly applied model system in biology. We here make the case that both perceptual and methodological barriers have played a role in the relative neglect of molluscs as research organisms. We then summarize the current application and potential of molluscs and [...]