Preprints
There are 1692 Preprints listed.
An unrecognized genetic predisposition for sperm competition in aphids
Published: 2024-07-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
A hitherto unrecognized genetic predisposition for sperm competition exists in aphids. The females of a clone are diploid for the autosomes and sex chromosomes: AA/XX (where A stands for a haploid set of autosomes). Production of males is parthenogenetic, except for the random loss of one X chromosome. Male offspring is diploid for the autosomes but haploid for the sex chromosomes (AA/X0). Hence, [...]
Accelerating ecosystem monitoring through computer vision with deep metric learning
Published: 2024-07-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Feature extraction from environmental observation data based on deep learning models has made significant progress. However, the current methods may not be optimal because of the increasing volume of data, complexity of data characteristics, and labeled data limitations. In this study, we focused on deep metric learning as a new application for environmental observation data to overcome these [...]
A pilot analysis shows that climatic conditions and resource availability along tropical and temperate gradients of the Americas impact the co-occurrence pattern of nectarivorous species
Published: 2024-07-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Abstract Aim While biodiversity trends and patterns are shaped by both biotic interactions and abiotic factors, biodiversity may vary in space and time when responding to environmental conditions across clines. However, we lack the knowledge of how biotic and abiotic factors determine species co-occurrence to influence community assemblage that can impact biodiversity trends and patterns across [...]
Scanning the skies for migrants: Conservation-focused opportunities for a pan-European automated telemetry network
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Accelerated biodiversity loss during the Anthropocene has destabilised functional links within and between ecosystems. Migratory species that cross different ecosystems on their repeated journeys between breeding and non-breeding sites are particularly sensitive to global change because they are exposed to various, often ecosystem-specific threats. As these bring both lethal and non-lethal [...]
Precision Pathway Engineering in Plants: Enhancing Crop Resilience and Productivity for Sustainable Agriculture
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Recent advancements in metabolic engineering have opened new avenues for addressing critical challenges in agriculture, nutrition, and sustainability. This study explores innovative strategies for manipulating plant metabolic pathways to enhance crop yield, nutritional value, stress tolerance, and the production of high-value compounds. We present novel findings on improving photosynthetic [...]
Assisted colonisation for ecosystem function: a thought experiment for the British Isles
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Climate change is driving the rapid reorganisation of the world’s biota as species shift their ranges to track suitable conditions, however habitat fragmentation and other barriers hinder this adaptive response for species with limited dispersal ability. The translocation of species into newly suitable areas to which they are unable to disperse naturally has been suggested to conserve species [...]
Experimental evolution of a mammalian holobiont: the genetic and maternal effects in bank voles selected for herbivorous capability
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mammalian herbivory represents a complex adaptation requiring evolutionary changes across all levels of biological organization, from molecules to morphology to behavior. Explaining the evolution of such complex traits represents a major challenge in biology, simultaneously muddled and enlightened by a growing awareness of the crucial role of symbiotic associations in shaping organismal [...]
Lack of parental mate-switching effects on offspring fitness components in a long-lived socially monogamous species
Published: 2024-07-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
In many species, individuals form socially monogamous pair-bonds lasting multiple breeding seasons, or even whole lifetimes. Studies often suggest social monogamy to be adaptive, but this is usually quantified through the survival and annual reproductive success of the partners. However, beyond the number of offspring produced, parental partnerships may also affect their offspring’s phenotype, [...]
gibbonNetR: an R Package for the Use of Convolutional Neural Networks and Transfer Learning on Acoustic Data
Published: 2024-07-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Automated detection of acoustic signals is crucial for effective monitoring of vocal animals and their habitats across large spatial and temporal scales. Recent advances in deep learning have made high performance automated detection approaches more accessible to more practitioners. However, there are few deep learning approaches that can be implemented natively in R. The 'torch for R' ecosystem [...]
Competition for pollen deposition space on pollinators generates last-male advantage
Published: 2024-07-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Many plants have precise pollen placement strategies so that large amounts of pollen can be found over very small and discrete areas located on pollinators. This may lead to male-male competition if pre-existing pollen (1) is smothered or displaced by pollen from subsequent male flowers or (2) prevents subsequent pollen from attaching to pollinators. We investigated these alternative hypotheses [...]
Measuring the edges of species’ geographic ranges
Published: 2024-07-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. The fundamental unit of spatial ecology is a species range: the geographic area that it occupies. Species ranges are delineated by range edges (also known as boundaries or limits). Why range edges occur where they do and not elsewhere, and what makes them move, has been an active area of research since the 19th century. In the present day, range edge dynamics are an important metric of [...]
Evaluation of livelihoods programming in Biodiversity Challenge Funds projects
Published: 2024-07-12
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Economics
The UK government's Biodiversity Challenge Funds (BCF; including Darwin Initiative, Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund, and Darwin Plus) have funded hundreds of conservation projects across the Global South since the early 1990s. Increasingly, these projects include goals relating to human livelihoods, recognising the complex interrelationships between poverty reduction and biodiversity [...]
Exposure to lead (Pb) contamination paradoxically heightens predator avoidance behaviours in an urban bird
Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences
To survive, prey animals must correctly assess and respond to predation, by vigilantly scanning their environment for threats, assessing predation risk through gaze aversion (responding fearfully to predator gaze), and escaping efficiently. As these anti-predatory behaviours are integrated through the nervous and motor systems, they could be disrupted by neurotoxic contaminants, such as lead [...]
A pattern-oriented simulation for forecasting species spread through time and space: A case study on an ecosystem engineer on the move
Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Modelling the spread of introduced ecosystem engineers is a conservation priority due to their potential to cause irreversible ecosystem-level changes. Existing models predict potential distributions and spread capacities, but new approaches that simulate the trajectory of a species’ spread over time are needed. We have developed novel simulations that predict spatial and temporal spread, [...]
Marine resources alter tundra food web dynamics by subsidizing a terrestrial predator on the sea ice
Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Predator use of resource subsidies can strengthen top-down effects on prey when predators respond numerically to subsidies. Although allochthonous subsidies are generally transported along natural gradients, consumers can cross ecosystem boundaries to acquire subsidies, thereby linking disparate ecosystems. In coastal Arctic ecosystems, terrestrial predators can easily cross into the marine [...]