Preprints
There are 1649 Preprints listed.
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 [...]
Is the audience gender-blind? Smaller audience in female talks highlights prestige differences in academia
Published: 2024-05-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Evolution, Gender Equity in Education, Higher Education, Inequality and Stratification, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Psychological Phenomena and Processes
Although diverse perspectives are fundamental for fostering and advancing science, power relations have limited the development, propagation of ideas, and recognition of minority groups in academia. Gender bias is one of the most well-documented processes, leading women to drop out of their academic careers due to fewer opportunities and lower prestige. Using long-term data (2008-2019) on talks [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Central Pacific
Published: 2024-05-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The Central Pacific mangrove province is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology) including the marine ecoregions of the Gilbert/Ellis Islands, Marshall Islands, Phoenix/Tokelau/Northern Cook Islands, and Samoa Islands. The Central Pacific mangroves had a mapped extent in 2020 of 4.8 km2, representing less than 0.01% of the global mangrove area. The biota [...]
Ethical dilemma in conservation: a trolley problem thought experiment
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Nature and Society Relations
Conservation decisions often need to integrate scientific predictions with societal values, ethical systems, and diverse perceptions that combine to form moral stances about conservation actions (e.g., trophy hunting or controlling invasive species). These can result in dilemmas and, if stakeholders hold different views on the morality of particular conservation actions, conflicts can arise. Here [...]
Unveiling the temporal signatures of demographic stochasticity from populations to metacommunities
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
The temporal stability of ecological properties tends to increase with spatial scale and levels of biological organization, which is mostly associated with deterministic processes. However, random fluctuations caused by demographic stochasticity in small populations might extend to communities and metacommunities, potentially affecting stability propagation across biological levels and spatial [...]
Light Pollution at Sea: Implications and Potential Hazards of Human Activity for Offshore Bird and Bat Movements in the Greater North Sea
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management, Zoology
Human activity in the North Sea is intensifying, as emerging uses, such as offshore wind farms (OWFs) and liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals, are added to fishing, freight shipping and fossil fuel production as traditional forms of resource exploitation. The volume and scale of these additional installations are projected to increase substantially in the coming decades, which amplifies the need [...]