Preprints

There are 1954 Preprints listed.

Persistent effects of landscape connectivity on recruitment dynamics in secondary forests

Michiel van Breugel, Jefferson S. Hall, Mario Bailon, et al.

Published: 2024-05-20
Subjects: Life Sciences

Large scale reforestation is promoted as an important strategy to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. A persistent challenge for efforts to restore ecosystems at scale is how to accelerate ecological processes, particularly natural regeneration. Yet, despite being recognized as an important barrier to the recovery of diverse plant communities in agricultural landscapes, the impacts of [...]

Temperature dependence of pollen germination and tube growth in conifers relates to their distribution along an elevational gradient in Washington State, USA

Hsin-Wu Hsu, Soo-Hyung Kim

Published: 2024-05-20
Subjects: Life Sciences

•Background and Aims: Pollen germination and tube growth are essential processes for successful fertilization. They are among the most temperature-vulnerable stages and subsequently affect seed production and determine population persistence and species distribution under climate change. Our study aims to investigate intra- and inter-specific variations in the temperature dependence of pollen [...]

How is the effectiveness of terrestrial protected areas to conserve biodiversity measured? A systematic map

Neal R Haddaway, Natasha Stoudmann, Sini Savilaakso

Published: 2024-05-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences

Protected areas (PAs) are fundamental in preserving ecological diversity, supporting ecosystem services, and mitigating human impacts in today’s world. However, the mere designation of PAs is insufficient for achieving conservation goals. It needs to be ensured through employment of robust management practices and the deployment of scientifically sound monitoring methodologies. This systematic [...]

IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Tropical Northwestern Atlantic

Carlos Troche-Souza, Ariel E. Lugo, Tamara Heartsill-Scalley, et al.

Published: 2024-05-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Mangroves of the Tropical Northwestern Atlantic is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Bahamian, Carolinian, Eastern Caribbean, Floridian, Greater Antilles, Northern Gulf of Mexico, Southern Caribbean, Southern Gulf of Mexico, Southwestern Caribbean and Western Caribbean. The mapped extent of mangroves in 2020 [...]

Monitoring the land and sea: Enhancing efficiency through CRISPR-Cas driven depletion and enrichment of environmental DNA

Anya Kardailsky, Benjamín Durán-Vinet, Georgia Nester, et al.

Published: 2024-05-14
Subjects: Life Sciences

Characterising biodiversity using environmental DNA (eDNA) represents a paradigm shift in our capacity for biomonitoring complex environments, both aquatic and terrestrial. However, eDNA biomonitoring is limited by biases towards certain species and the low taxonomic resolution of current metabarcoding approaches. Shotgun metagenomics of eDNA enables the collection of whole ecosystem data by [...]

Proactive management outperforms reactive strategies for wildlife disease control

Molly Bletz, Evan Grant, Graziella DiRenzo

Published: 2024-05-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Finding effective pathogen mitigation strategies is one of the biggest challenges humans face today. In the context of wildlife, emerging infectious diseases have repeatedly caused widespread host morbidity and population declines of numerous taxa. In areas yet unaffected by a pathogen, a proactive management approach has the potential to minimize or prevent host mortality. However, we typically [...]

Designing causal mediation analyses to quantify intermediary processes in ecology

Hannah E Correia, Laura E Dee, Paul J Ferraro

Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistical Methodology

Ecologists seek to understand the intermediary ecological processes through which changes in one attribute in a system affect other attributes. Yet, quantifying the causal effects of these mediating processes in ecological systems is challenging. We must define what we mean by a “mediated effect”, determine what assumptions are required to estimate mediation effects without bias, and assess [...]

Simple and robust models of ecological abundance

John Alroy

Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

1. Counts of species in ecological samples are of interest when they tell us about community assembly processes. Older process-based models of count distributions are either complex, widely rejected, or not able to predict high unevenness. 2. I leverage a general strategy for deriving simple one-parameter models. A distribution of abundances x on a continuous scale is predicted from a [...]

Factors Influencing Support for Bat Management and Conservation in the Wildland-Urban Interface

Michael Petriello, Catrin Edgeley, Carol Chambers, et al.

Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about bats often underlie social support for bat management and intentions to conserve bats. Effective bat conservation and management hinges on understanding these drivers across contexts. Lands classified as wildland-urban interface (WUI) are rapidly expanding in the USA, increasing the likelihood of human-bat interactions from management practices and [...]

Evidence for avian core-Merge is indisputable: A reply to Beckers et al. (2024)

Toshitaka N. Suzuki, Yui K. Matsumoto

Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Life Sciences

It has been hypothesized that the generative power of language stems from a cognitive capacity called “Merge,” which enables senders to combine two linguistic items (e.g., two words or two phrases) into a sequence and receivers to recognize it as a single unit (Chomsky, 1995, 2001). In an experimental study published in Nature Communications (Suzuki and Matsumoto, 2022), we demonstrated that a [...]

Microevolutionary change in wild stickleback: using integrative time-series data to infer responses to selection

Kasha Strickland, Blake Matthews, Zophonias Jonsson, et al.

Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Life Sciences

Identifying microevolutionary change in the wild requires linking trait change to shifts in allele fre-quencies, but existing approaches poorly account for different modes of selection that act simulta-neously on correlated traits. Using an integrative phenome-genome time-series dataset collected on wild threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), we identified how different modes of [...]

Brownification shapes the food web of aquatic invertebrates: a review

Wenfei Liao, Petri Nummi

Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Brownification, a global phenomenon of increasing surface water colour to yellow-brown hues, has an array of effects on drinking water supply and aquatic biodiversity. Aquatic invertebrates, as indicators of aquatic ecosystem health and providers of ecosystem services, have received limited attention in the context of water browning. In this review, we explored the effects of brownification on [...]

Uncovering multiple influences on space use by deer mice using NEON data

Sean O'Fallon, Noa Pinter-Wollman, Karen Mabry

Published: 2024-05-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences

Space use by animals is affected by multiple factors; previous researchers have examined the effects of influences such as sex, body condition, and population density on home range area. However, evaluating the simultaneous influences of multiple factors on animal space use has been relatively intractable due to sample size limitations. We capitalize on National Ecological Observatory Network [...]

Revised molecular phylogenetic analysis of Leucheria Lag. sensu lato (Asteraceae; Nassauvieae) and implications for morphological and ecological evolution

Mark Alan Hershkovitz

Published: 2024-05-10
Subjects: Biodiversity

In a preceding work, I reanalyzed published ribosomal and plastome DNA sequence data for selected species of Leucheria Lag. and related Nassauvieae (Asteraceae). I reported that the genus Polyachyrus Lag. is phylogenetically nested within Leucheria, hence I transferred species of the former into the latter. I also demonstrated that the monotypic Oxyphyllum Phil. pertains to the Leucheria crown [...]

Advancing single species abundance models: robust models for predicting abundance using co-occurrence from communities

Aliénor Stahl, Eric J Pedersen, Pedro R. Peres-Neto

Published: 2024-05-10
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biology

Accurate estimates of abundance are crucial for successful conservation and management. However, gathering abundance data is costly. Species Abundance Models (SAMs) are increasingly used to predict variation in abundance for resource management for single species, but collecting enough relevant environmental information to build effective SAMs can often be challenging. Species co-occurrence [...]

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