Preprints
There are 1544 Preprints listed.
The world was our oyster: Records reveal the vast historical extent of European oyster reef ecosystems
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Marine Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Anthropogenic activities have impacted marine ecosystems at extraordinary scales. Biogenic reef ecosystems built by the European flat oyster (Ostrea edulis) typically declined prior to scientific monitoring. Collating >1,600 records published over 350 years, we created a highly resolved (10km2) map of historical oyster reef presence across its biogeographic range, including documenting abundant [...]
Historical redlining impacts wildlife biodiversity across California
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Legacy effects describe the persistent, long-term impacts on an ecosystem following the removal of an abiotic or biotic feature. Redlining, a policy that codified racial segregation and disinvestment in minoritized neighborhoods, has produced legacy effects with profound impacts on urban ecosystem structure and health. These legacies have detrimentally impacted public health outcomes, [...]
Historical dataset details the distribution, extent and form of lost Ostrea edulis reef ecosystems.
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Marine Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ocean ecosystems have been subjected to anthropogenic influences for centuries, but the scale of past ecosystem changes is often unknown. For centuries, the European flat oyster (Ostrea edulis), an ecosystem engineer providing biogenic reef habitats, was a culturally and economically significant source of food and trade. These reef habitats are now functionally extinct, and almost no memory of [...]
Detecting context-dependence in the expression of demographic tradeoffs
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Population Biology
Life history tradeoffs are one of the central tenets of evolutionary demography. Tradeoffs, depicting negative phenotypic or genetic covariances between individuals’ demographic rates, arise from a finite amount of resources that each individual has to allocate in a zero-sum game between somatic and reproductive functions. While theory predicts that tradeoffs are ubiquitous, empirical studies [...]
The OptoReg system: A simple and inexpensive solution for regulating water oxygen.
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
This paper describes an optocoupler-based regulation apparatus for saturation manipulation of oxygen in water (OptoReg). This system enables control of solenoid valves for oxygen and nitrogen gases using a FireSting-O2 meter, an optocoupler box, and an electronic switch box. The hardware components connect to a computer through USB cables. The control software is free and has a graphical user [...]
Natural selection is less efficient at species range edges
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Changing species distributions due to global change underscore a pressing need to better understand range limits. However, our knowledge of general determinants of range limits remains poor despite over a century of work. Theoretical models demonstrate that genetic drift should strengthen across environmental gradients. This can limit natural selection to the point where populations can no longer [...]
How does vector diversity influence the transmission efficiency of barley yellow dwarf virus? Perspectives from a review
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Entomology, Plant Pathology
Cereals are some of the most important global crops that contribute directly and indirectly to the production of food for human consumption. Cereal aphids can cause significant damage to wheat, barley, and oats, particularly via the transmission of plant viruses that cause devastating plant diseases, such as yellow dwarf disease. Yellow dwarf disease is caused by two related viruses within the [...]
Parental Brain Through Time: function, anatomy, and molecular mechanisms in contexts
Published: 2023-12-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mammalian parental care is highly mother-biased, prompting researchers to presume its connection to female reproductive behavior and physiology, not male. However, recent findings in neurobiological studies suggest the opposite. Considering the evolutionary path of mammalian parental care, the ancestral form of vertebrate parental care appears to be male-biased as in living teleosts (bony fish), [...]
otb: Creating a HiC/HiFi Pipeline to Assemble the Prosapia bicincta Genome
Published: 2023-12-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genomics, Other Animal Sciences
The implementation of a new genomic assembly pipeline named Only The Best (otb) has effectively addressed various challenges associated with data management during the development and storage of genome assemblies. otb, which incorporates a comprehensive pipeline involving a setup layer, quality checks, templating, and the integration of Nextflow and Singularity. The primary objective of otb is to [...]
The interplay between satiation and temptation drives cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus foraging behaviour and service quality towards client reef fish
Published: 2023-12-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Supply and demand affect the values of goods exchanged in cooperative trades where high demand typically leads to a higher price. An exception has been described in the marine cleaning mutualism involving the cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus and its variety of ‘client’ coral reef fishes. Cleaner fish feed on clients’ ectoparasites but prefer eating clients’ mucus instead, which constitutes [...]
Escape tendency and the mobility behavior of four alpine rodents do not change with altitude
Published: 2023-12-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Zoology
Behavioural responses are particularly important to quantify species-specific habitat influences on natural selection. Mountains, with their wide range of habitats, can be regarded as a valuable context where the environmental conditions influence animal behaviour. We studied the inter-specific variation in the escape tendency and the mobility behaviour in four alpine rodents’ species, a bank [...]
Assessing diverse values of nature requires multilingual evidence
Published: 2023-12-04
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
When the day ends: Shedding light on the role of nocturnal moths as pollinators in tropical ecosystems
Published: 2023-12-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
This review synthesises available knowledge on the moth pollination of tropical plants. We reviewed moth adaptations for nectar feeding, floral traits tailored to moth preferences, plant adaptations to moth pollination, the relative proportion of pollination syndromes and the proportion of moth-pollinated plants in tropical communities. Moths are adapted to foraging by advanced vision and [...]
Optimising Species Distribution Models: Sample size, positional error, and sampling bias matter
Published: 2023-12-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Species distribution models (SDMs) have proven valuable in filling gaps in our knowledge of species occurrences. However, despite their broad applicability, SDMs exhibit critical shortcomings due to limitations in species occurrence data. These limitations include, in particular, issues related to sample size, positional error, and sampling bias. In addition, it is widely recognized that the [...]
Functional coherence among miRNA targets: a potential metric for assessing biological signal among target prediction methods in non-model species
Published: 2023-11-30
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Although miRNA regulation of protein production is a likely target of adaptive evolution, high false-positive rates in the identification of mRNAs targeted by miRNAs in non-model species’ complicates interpretation of recent advances. Here we document the challenges and then outline steps for the community to address these challenges.