Preprints
There are 1649 Preprints listed.
Apes and Agriculture
Published: 2023-05-22
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Environmental Studies, Zoology
Non-human great apes – chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans – are threatened by agricultural expansion particularly from rice, cacao, cassava, maize, and oil palm cultivation. Agriculture replaces and fragments great ape habitats, bringing them closer to humans and often resulting in conflict. Though the impact of agriculture on great apes is well-recognized, there is still a need for [...]
The great escape: patterns of enemy release are not explained by time, space, or climate
Published: 2023-05-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
When a plant is introduced to a new ecosystem it may escape from some of its coevolved herbivores. Reduced herbivore damage, and the ability of introduced plants to allocate resources from defence to growth and reproduction can increase the success of introduced species. This mechanism is known as enemy release and is known to occur in some species and situations, but not in others. Understanding [...]
The power and pitfalls of amino acid carbon stable isotopes for tracing origin and use of basal resources in food webs
Published: 2023-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Natural and anthropogenic stressors alter the composition, biomass, and nutritional quality of primary producers and microorganisms, the basal organisms that synthesise the biomolecules essential for metazoan growth and survival (i.e. basal resources). Traditional biomarkers have provided valuable insight into the spatiotemporal dynamics of basal resource use, but lack specificity in identifying [...]
Spatially explicit Bayesian hierarchical models improve avian population status and trends
Published: 2023-05-19
Subjects: Population Biology
Population trend estimates form the core of avian conservation assessments in North America and indicate important changes in the state of the natural world. The models used to estimate these trends would be more efficient and informative for conservation if they explicitly considered the spatial locations of the monitoring data. We created spatially explicit versions of some standard status and [...]
Biodiversity promotes resistance but dominant species shape recovery of grasslands under extreme drought
Published: 2023-05-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Climate, Life Sciences
1. How biodiversity underpins ecosystem resistance (i.e., ability to withstand environmental perturbations) and recovery (i.e., ability to return to a pre-perturbation state) and thus stability under extreme climatic events is a timely question in ecology. To date, most studies have focused on the role of taxonomic diversity, neglecting how community functional composition and diversity beget [...]
Body condition and background noise alter female responses to uni- and multimodal signals emitted by a male mimicking robot frog
Published: 2023-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Mate choice in females is influenced by intrinsic and extrinsic factors, including signal conspicuity, receiver body condition, and environmental properties. These factors interact in complex ways to modulate the choice of mates. Multimodal signals are more conspicuous than their unimodal components and therefore should elicit a stronger response. However, variations in female body condition [...]
Implementing Code Review in the Scientific Workflow: Insights from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Published: 2023-05-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Code review increases reliability and improves reproducibility of research. As such, code review is an inevitable step in software development and is common in fields such as computer science. However, despite its importance, code review is noticeably lacking in ecology and evolutionary biology. This is problematic as it facilitates the propagation of coding errors and a reduction in [...]
Biogeochemistry of soils, sediments, and surface waters across the upland to wetland gradient of coastal interfaces
Published: 2023-05-16
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Transferable and mechanistic understanding of cross-scale interactions is necessary to predict how coastal systems respond to global change. Cohesive datasets across geographically distributed sites can enable a mechanistic understanding of coastal ecosystem control points and examine how geographically transferable this knowledge is. To address the above research objectives, data were collected [...]
Survival of the luckiest
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Opposite dynamics are behind natural selection and sexual selection. While the fittest survives in natural selection, the survivor will most likely be the luckiest when both dynamics are combined. As a result, chance has a greater impact on evolution.
iNaturalist is an open science resource for ecological genomics by enabling rapid and tractable records of initial observations of sequenced specimens
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
The rapidly growing body of publicly available sequencing data for rare species and/or wild-caught samples is accelerating the need for detailed records of the samples used to generate datasets. Many already published datasets are unlikely to ever be reused, not due to problems with the data themselves, but due to their questionable or unverifiable origins. In this paper, I present iNaturalist – [...]
Social media records hold valuable information for conservation planning
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Here, focussing on Bangladesh - a tropical mega-diverse and mega-populated country, we examine the potential importance of social media [...]
Uncovering the hidden niche: incorporating microclimate temperature into species distribution models
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Species’ environmental niches are conventionally modelled using coarse-grained macroclimate data. These data are known to deviate substantially from local, near-ground and proximal conditions (i.e., the microclimate), especially so below forests canopies. Here we aimed to assess the impact of using gridded microclimate data instead of gridded macroclimate data on the performance of species [...]
Towards understanding the impact of mycorrhizal fungal environments on the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems.
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mutualistic interactions between plants and soil fungi, mycorrhizae, control carbon and nutrient fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. Soil of ecosystems featuring a particular type of mycorrhiza exhibit specific properties across multiple dimensions of soil functioning. The knowledge about the impacts of mycorrhizal fungi on soil functioning accumulated so far, indicates that these impacts are of [...]
The “faulty male” hypothesis: implications for evolution and disease
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biological differences between males and females lead to many differences in physiology, disease, and overall health. One of the most prominent disparities is in the number of germline mutations passed to offspring: human males transmit three times as many mutations as do females. While the classic explanation for this pattern invokes differences in post-puberty germline replication between the [...]
Using Machine Learning to Link Climate, Phylogeny and Leaf Traits in Eucalypts Through a 50-fold Expansion of Current Leaf Trait Datasets
Published: 2023-05-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Leaf size varies within and between species, and previous work has linked this variation to the environment and evolutionary history separately. However, many previous studies fail to interlink both factors and are often data limited. To address this, our study developed a new workflow using machine learning to automate the extraction of leaf traits (leaf area, largest in-circle area and leaf [...]