Preprints
There are 1649 Preprints listed.
Virtual Reef Diver: enabling people to help protect the Great Barrier Reef
Published: 2023-01-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Two Sustainable Development Goals are focused directly on combating the impacts of climate change on coral reef communities. These are: Goal 13 “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts” and Goal 14 “Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development”. Citizen science (CS) features prominently in a range of programs that have been [...]
Determinants of synergistic cell-cell interactions in bacteria
Published: 2023-01-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Bacteria are ubiquitous and colonize virtually every conceivable habitat on earth. To achieve this, bacteria require different metabolites and biochemical capabilities. Rather than trying to produce all of the needed materials by themselves, bacteria have evolved a range of synergistic interactions, in which they exchange different commodities with other members of their local community. While it [...]
Fine-scale interplay between decline and growth determines the spatial recovery of coral communities within a reef
Published: 2023-01-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
As coral reefs endure increasing levels of disturbance, understanding recovery patterns of reef-building hard corals is paramount to assessing the sustainability of these ecosystems. At local scales, coral recovery slows down; however, it's unclear how this trend propagates across spatial scales due to the inherent complexity of coral dynamics. In this paper, we aimed to learn about fine scale [...]
More Than Half of Statistically Significant Research Findings in the Environmental Sciences are Actually Not
Published: 2023-01-26
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Researchers have incentives to search for and selectively report findings that appear to be statistically significant and/or conform to prior beliefs. Such selective reporting practices, including p-hacking and publication bias, can lead to a distorted set of results being published, potentially undermining the process of knowledge accumulation and evidence-based decision making. We take stock of [...]
Meta-community processes supersede leaf subsidy effects on lake aquatic communities
Published: 2023-01-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
There is a growing consensus that cross-ecosystem fluxes significantly influence the structure and stability of aquatic communities. What remains unclear, however, is the relative importance and potential interactions of those fluxes to/with other well-studied factors affecting aquatic community structure such as local environmental parameters or regional-scale influences related to connectivity [...]
The impact of rising temperatures on the prevalence of coral diseases and its predictability: a global meta-analysis
Published: 2023-01-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistical Models
Coral reefs are under threat from disease as climate change alters environmental conditions. Rising temperatures exacerbate coral disease, but this relationship is likely complex as other factors also influence coral disease prevalence. To better understand this relationship, we meta-analytically examined 108 studies for changes in global coral disease over time alongside temperature, expressed [...]
Marine cleaning mutualisms provide new insights in biological market dynamics
Published: 2023-01-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Most mutually beneficial social interactions (cooperation within species, mutualism between species) involve some degree of partner choice. In an analogy to economic theory as applied to human trading practices, biological market theory (BMT) focusses on how partner choice affects payoff distributions among non-human traders. BMT has inspired a great diversity of research, including research on [...]
Why do some fish grow faster than others?
Published: 2023-01-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Physiology
All animals must acquire food to grow, but there is a vast diversity in how different species and even different individuals approach and achieve this task. Individuals within a species appear to fall along a bold-shy continuum, whereby some fish acquire food aggressively and with seemingly high risk, while others appear more submissive and opportunistic. Greater food consumption generally [...]
Demographic signals of population decline and time to extinction in a seasonal, density-dependent model
Published: 2023-01-21
Subjects: Population Biology
Nearly all wild populations live in seasonal environments in which they experience regular fluctuations in environmental conditions that drive population dynamics. Recent empirical evidence from experimental populations of Drosophila suggests that demographic signals inherent in the counts of seasonal populations, including reproduction and survival, can indicate when in the annual cycle habitat [...]
Sex-specific covariation between exploratory behavior and natal dispersal strategies in a natural cooperative breeding passerine population
Published: 2023-01-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Natal dispersal is a major life-history strategy that has pervasive consequences on the spatial and genetic structure of populations. Between-individual variation in personality traits is increasingly recognized as an important determinant of natal dispersal via ‘personality-dependent dispersal’. However, few studies have investigated the importance of personalities in the context of delayed [...]
Psychological and Cultural Factors Influencing Antibiotic Prescription
Published: 2023-01-20
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Psychiatry and Psychology
Humans have been giving a selective advantage to antibiotic-resistant bacteria worldwide by inundating the environment with antimicrobials for about one century. As a result, the efficacy of antibiotics has been impaired. Antibiotic resistance is a public health problem, responsible for increases in mortality and extended stays at hospitals. Hospitals and other clinical settings have implemented [...]
Beta diversity of restored river dike grasslands is strongly influenced by uncontrolled spatio-temporal variability
Published: 2023-01-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Spatio-temporal dynamics of biodiversity are a key measure when monitoring restoration success. Balanced species turnover is aimed at because it increases overall biodiversity and improves ecosystem stability and multifunctionality. For predictive restoration, it is important to analyse spatial beta diversity and to identify its drivers like site characteristics but also uncontrolled factors [...]
The missing link: discerning true from false negatives when sampling species interaction networks
Published: 2023-01-19
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring
Ecosystems are composed of networks of interacting species. These interactions allow communities of species to persist through time through both neutral and adaptive processes. Despite their importance, a robust understanding of (and ability to predict and forecast) interactions among species remains elusive. This knowledge-gap is largely driven by a shortfall of data—although species occurrence [...]
Developmental environments do not affect thermal physiological traits in reptiles: An experimental test and meta-analysis
Published: 2023-01-19
Subjects: Evolution, Integrative Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
On a global scale, organisms face significant challenges due to climate change and anthropogenic disturbance. In many ectotherms, developmental and physiological processes are sensitive to changes in temperature and resources. Developmental plasticity in thermal physiology may provide adaptive advantages to environmental extremes if early environmental conditions are predictive of late-life [...]
Evolutionary Game Theory and the Adaptive Dynamics Approach: Adaptation where Individuals Interact
Published: 2023-01-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Evolutionary game theory and the adaptive dynamics approach have made invaluable contributions to understand how gradual evolution leads to adaptation when individuals interact. Here, we review some of the basic tools that have come out of these contributions to model the evolution of quantitative traits in complex populations. We collect together mathematical expressions that describe [...]