Preprints
There are 1649 Preprints listed.
Regenerating tropical forests are consistently affected by biological invasions across spatial scales
Published: 2023-07-04
Subjects: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Biological invasions are complex scale-dependent processes. Metacommunity ecology provides the means to understand the effects of invasive non-native species (INNS) because it explicitly considers how local and regional processes interact to drive the three main components of bio-diversity: alpha, beta, and gamma. White-popinac (Leucaena leucocephala (Lam.) de Wit) is a widely distributed INNS in [...]
Computationally reproducing results from meta-analyses in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology using shared code and data
Published: 2023-07-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Many journals in ecology and evolutionary biology encourage or require authors to make their data and code available alongside articles. In this study we investigated how often this data and code could be used together, when both were available, to computationally reproduce results published in articles. We surveyed the data and code sharing practices of 177 meta-analyses published in ecology and [...]
Extinction drives recent thermophilization but does not trigger homogenization in forest understory
Published: 2023-07-04
Subjects: Botany, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The ongoing climate change is triggering plant community thermophilization. This selection process is ought to shift community composition toward species adapted to warmer climates but may also lead to biotic homogenization. The link between thermophilization and homogenization, and the community dynamics that drive them (colonization and extinction) remain unknow, but is critical for [...]
Measuring historical pollution: natural history collections as tools for public health and environmental justice research
Published: 2023-07-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Health Policy, Inequality and Stratification, Nature and Society Relations, Public Policy, Urban Studies and Planning
Background: Through the industrial era, environmental pollution has been unevenly distributed in the environment, disproportionately impacting disenfranchised communities. The distribution of pollution is thus a question of environmental justice and public health that requires policy solutions. However, we lack robust quantitative data on pollutants for many locations and time periods because [...]
Prevalence and Potential Evolutionary Significance of Color Mutations in Freshwater Crayfish (Decapoda: Astacidea)
Published: 2023-07-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Color mutations may lead to the evolution and diversification of color phenotypes in animals. However, much of the research on this topic has been conducted on vertebrates. Here, I compile records of color mutations in freshwater crayfish (Decapoda: Astacidea). I found color mutations to be surprisingly common, with 103 documented occurrences. The overwhelming majority of these mutations resulted [...]
Biogeographical distributions of trickster animals
Published: 2023-07-03
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Human language encompasses almost endless potential for meaning and folklore can theoretically incorporate themes beyond time and space. However, actual distributions of the themes are not always universal and their constraints remain unclear. Here, we specifically focused on zoological folklore and aimed to reveal what restricts the distribution of trickster animals in folklore. We applied the [...]
Measuring the 3-30-300 Rule to Help Cities Meet Nature Access Thresholds
Published: 2023-07-02
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Epidemiology, Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The 3-30-300 rule offers benchmarks for cities to promote equitable nature access. It dictates that individuals should see three trees from their dwelling, have 30% tree canopy in their neighborhood, and live within 300 meters of a high-quality green space. Implementing this demands thorough measurement, monitoring, and evaluation methods. Seven data and processes exist to assess these [...]
HeliCat Canada’s Wildlife Observations Program: Trends and Findings 2012-2022
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Natural Resources and Conservation
HeliCat Canada members operating in mountain caribou range have been collecting and reporting wildlife sightings data since 2010, resulting in more than 3,750 spatially referenced sightings of animals and tracks by the end of the 2022 operating season. Mountain caribou, mountain goats, and wolverine have been the most commonly recorded species, with caribou observations generally declining over [...]
Lipid Metabolism in Parasitoids and Parasitized Hosts
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Physiology
Parasitoids have an exceptional lifestyle where juvenile development is spent on or in a single host insect, but the adults are free-living. Unlike parasites, parasitoids always kill their host. How parasitoids use such a limiting resource, particularly lipids, is important for their chances to survive and reproduce. In part 1, we describe the parasitoid lifestyle, including typical developmental [...]
A call to expand global change research in LTER coastal wetlands
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Global change stressors are altering the structure of ecological communities with significant implications for the functions and services that ecosystems provide. Coastal zones are particularly susceptible to such stressors, yet our collective understanding of the long-term effects of global change on these systems and, in particular, the consumer species found within them, is limited. The US [...]
Shall we all adopt, with no worries, the ‘within a configuration’ approach in geometric morphometrics? A comment on claims that the effect of the superimposition and sliding on shape data is “not an obstacle to analyses of integration and modularity”
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
The study of modularity and integration using Procrustes geometric morphometrics has become a prominent approach in evolutionary developmental biology. A most popular method is the ‘within a configuration’ approach, often used in combination with ‘high density’ morphometric data (i.e., large numbers of landmarks and semilandmarks). In 2019, I realized that this approach violates a basic [...]
Camtrap DP: An open standard for the FAIR exchange and archiving of camera trap data
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Population Biology
Camera trapping has revolutionized wildlife ecology and conservation by providing automated data acquisition, leading to the accumulation of massive amounts of camera trap data worldwide. Although management and processing of camera trap-derived Big Data are becoming increasingly solvable with the help of scalable cyber-infrastructures, harmonization and exchange of the data remain limited, [...]
Unleashing the Potential of Artificial Reefs Design: A Purpose-Driven Evaluation of Structural Complexity
Published: 2023-06-30
Subjects: Engineering
Artificial reefs (AR) must be built according to their objective and show high complexity to mimic the characteristic of natural habitats. To enhance the integration of artificial structures into ecosystems, a new quantitative method has been developed to evaluate their complexity, using 3D computer-aided design (CAD) models of ARs. The method utilizes six metrics: three related to geometric [...]
Adaptive parsimony as an evolutionary solution to the equilibrium selection problem
Published: 2023-06-29
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Many games, especially repeated games, have multiple Nash equilibria, which limits the predictive power of game theory for understanding animal behavior. In this article, I propose a solution to this problem inspired by the notion of stability by convergence from adaptive dynamics. The multiplicity of equilibria is due to the possibility of strategies that are arbitrary in the sense that they are [...]
Seascape genomics: assisting marine biodiversity management by combining genetic knowledge with environmental and ecological information
Published: 2023-06-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biodiversity, including genetic diversity, is the foundation of ecosystems and the well-being of all organisms, including humans. Determining how the marine environment shapes genetic diversity and developing best practices to conserve it requires a multi-disciplinary approach incorporating genomic and environmental information. Seascape genetics and genomics combine spatially resolved [...]