Preprints
There are 1954 Preprints listed.
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Western Indian Ocean
Published: 2024-06-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
‘Mangroves of the Western Indian Ocean’ is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). This province spans 10 countries and includes the following marine ecoregions: Cargados Carajos/Tromelin Island, Delagoa, Mascarene Islands, Seychelles, Southeast Madagascar, East African Coral Coast, Northern Monsoon Current Coast, Bight of Sofala/Swamp [...]
Climate-mediated hybridization and the future of Andean forests
Published: 2024-06-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
The tropical Andes face unprecedented warming and shifting precipitation patterns due to climate change and land-use alteration, challenging the futures of Andean forests. During the Quaternary, many Andean trees responded to climate change through upslope migrations, but while there is evidence of ongoing upslope migrations in many species, they are at rates far below what is need to remain in [...]
Supporting study registration to reduce research waste
Published: 2024-06-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Research suffers from many inefficiencies. These lead to much research being avoidably wasted, with no or limited value to the end user (e.g. an estimated 82-89% of ecological research, and 85% of medical research). Here, we argue that the quality and impact of ecological research could be drastically improved by registration: pre-registration, and registered reports. However, without a [...]
IPDToolkit: An R package for simulation and Bayesian analysis of iterated prisoner’s dilemma game-play under third-party arbitration
Published: 2024-06-04
Subjects: Anthropology, Political Science, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recently, researchers have begun studying the role that third-party arbitration may play in the evolution of cooperation. Using the iterated prisoner’s dilemma (IPD), they show that arbitration can mitigate the negative effects of perception errors on the stability of cooperative strategies. Open questions, both theoretical and empirical, however, remain. To promote research on the role of [...]
Hunter-Gatherer Sociality and the Origins of Human Normative Thinking
Published: 2024-06-03
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Reconstructing the origin and evolution of culturally transmitted norms and institutions in the hominin lineage since our split from a common ancestry with African apes is a daunting task. By investigating the social structures of extant simple hunter-gatherers, as well as the evidence of extensive social networks and long-distance trade in early modern humans, we believe that regulation of [...]
Familiarity with social partners influences affiliative interactions but not spatial associations
Published: 2024-06-01
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology
To successfully navigate complex social environments, animals must manage their relationships with familiar group members and strangers introduced via fission-fusion or demographic processes by deciding who, how often, and when to interact. However, it is not clear how animals balance the risks and benefits of interacting with familiar and stranger conspecifics. We studied whether familiarity [...]
Eco-evolutionary dynamics in grasslands during land use change: consequences for plant-microbe interactions and ecosystem function
Published: 2024-06-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Land use change can cause the loss of plant species and functional diversity, but whether it drives eco-evolutionary changes within plant species is unclear. 2. Semi-natural grasslands are particularly threatened by land use change, including management intensification on productive soils and abandonment on marginal land. As such, they serve as an excellent system for exploring if and how [...]
Species- and community-level demographic responses of saplings to drought during tropical secondary succession
Published: 2024-06-01
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Forest Biology, Plant Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Naturally regenerating secondary vegetation dominates the tropical forest landscapes, showing a remarkable capacity to sequester carbon, but such a role is threatened by increasing drought predicted with climate change. To understand how secondary forest species and communities respond to drought, we leverage a long-term chronosequence of tropical successional forests from Central Panama that [...]
Evolutionary principles underpinning codon usage bias: patterns, functions, and mechanisms
Published: 2024-05-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Synonymous codons are used unevenly despite coding for the same amino acid. Recent work has provided critical insights into the functions, mechanisms, and fitness consequences of codon usage bias and synonymous mutations. However, experiments aimed at understanding the role of synonymous mutations often involve only a small number of reporter genes. How do these observations generalize across [...]
Methods to identify silk gland activation patterns in spider spinning behaviours
Published: 2024-05-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Spiders possess multiple types of silk glands, producing silk materials with contrasting properties, and which are deployed in distinct behavioural contexts, such as locomotion, prey capture and egg casing. Whereas the diversity of silk glands and spigots across different spider families is relatively well described, their biological functions (i.e., with which behaviour each gland type is [...]
Cladistic species definitions can lead to under-representation of biodiversity from adaptive radiations
Published: 2024-05-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Many species are paraphyletic, but current taxonomic practices often do not recognise this, and attempts are made to apply a monophyletic species concept. While allowing the recognition of ecomorphologically equivalent, or even phenotypically indistinguishable allopatric taxa as species, this often leads to combining distinctive local forms (such as cave-adapted populations) or even whole [...]
The role of large language models in interdisciplinary research: opportunities, challenges, and ways forward
Published: 2024-05-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Large language models (LLMs) are gaining importance in research as they offer many benefits. One often overlooked benefit is their potential to facilitate and support interdisciplinary research, which is key to addressing current global challenges, such as the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change. 2. LLMs can help reduce the [...]
Poor hypotheses and research waste in biology: learning from a theory crisis in psychology
Published: 2024-05-28
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
While psychologists have extensively discussed a ‘theory crisis’, there has been no debate about such a crisis in biology. However, biologists, especially those working in the fields of ecology and evolution, have long discussed communication failures between theoreticians and empiricists. We argue such failure is one aspect of a theory crisis because misapplied and misunderstood [...]
Navigating phylogenetic conflict and evolutionary inference in plants with target capture data
Published: 2024-05-28
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Target capture has quickly become a preferred approach for plant systematic and evolutionary research, marking a step-change in the generation of data for phylogenetic inference. While this advancement has facilitated the resolution of many phylogenetic relationships, phylogenetic conflict continues to be reported, and often attributed to genome duplication, reticulation, deep coalescence or [...]
Multiple Disturbances, Multiple Legacies: Fire, Canopy Gaps, and Deer Jointly Change the Forest Seed Bank
Published: 2024-05-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
The manipulation of pre-colonial disturbances in U.S. forests can play a critical role in determining ecological composition, structure, and function. However, our understanding of how concurrent disturbances influence non-tree species is extremely limited in forests. To this end, we used a long-term, multi-disturbance experiment in an oak dominated forest in West Virginia, U.S.A. that [...]