Preprints
There are 2536 Preprints listed.
FAIRification of DMRichR Pipeline: Advancing Epigenetic Research on Environmental and Evolutionary Model Organisms
Published: 2024-11-05
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Environmental Public Health, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Bioinformatics tools often prioritize humans or human-related model organisms, overlooking the requirements of environmentally relevant species, which limits their use in ecological research. This gap is particularly challenging when implementing existing software, as inadequate documentation can delay the innovative use of environmental models for modern risk assessment of chemicals that can [...]
The Deadly Trio: Do warming, acidification & deoxygenation destabilize the anemone-algae symbiosis?
Published: 2024-11-04
Subjects: Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences
Anthropogenic climate change is primarily driven by carbon dioxide release, which causes a domino effect of warming, acidification, and hypoxia in aquatic habitats. Using a fully-crossed experimental design, we investigated how exposure to this “deadly trio” of environmental stressors affects the sea anemone, Exaiptasia diaphana and its endosymbiotic dinoflagellates. To mimic conditions found on [...]
Beyond the concrete jungle: The value of urban biodiversity for regional conservation efforts
Published: 2024-11-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Urbanization deletes and degrades natural ecosystems, contributing to the ongoing biodiversity crisis. Yet, on the local scale, well-managed cities can host significant biodiversity, including endemic and threatened species. Understanding the trade-off between local and regional biodiversity outcomes is limited, primarily due to the lack of comprehensive sampling across heterogeneous urban areas [...]
Niche dynamics of alien plant species in Mediterranean Europe
Published: 2024-11-03
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Aim Humans have spread plants globally for millennia, inadvertently causing ecological disruptions. However, biological invasions also provide a unique opportunity to study the process of niche dynamics, through which species adapt their niche when confronted with novel environments. Focusing on the Mediterranean Basin, we assessed 1) which traits favour niche dynamics, and 2) whether niche [...]
Meromixis in the Anthropocene: pathways of change
Published: 2024-11-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Spider colour polymorphism is shaped by precipitation, not ambient temperature
Published: 2024-11-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Colour polymorphism, the presence of multiple colour variants within a population, is a common example of intraspecific phenotypic variation and has served as a model for studying drivers of diversity. Climatic factors can influence the distribution and abundance of colour variants, yet research often focuses on lineages where sexual selection covaries with the climate-colouration associations. [...]
Continental-scale empirical evidence for relationships between fire response strategies and fire frequency
Published: 2024-11-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Theory suggests that the dominance of resprouting and seeding, two key mechanisms through which plants persist with recurrent fire, both depend on other traits and vary with fire regime. However, these patterns remain largely untested over broad scales.We analysed the relationships between mean fire frequency, derived from MODIS satellite data, and resprouting and seeding strategies, [...]
Language, economic, and gender disparities widen the scientific productivity gap
Published: 2024-11-01
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Scientific communities need to understand and eliminate barriers that prevent scientists from reaching their full potential. However, the combined impact of individuals’ linguistic, economic, and gender backgrounds on their scientific productivity is poorly understood. Using a survey of 908 environmental scientists, we show that being a woman is associated with up to a 45% reduction in the number [...]
Towards a modern and efficient European biodiversity observation network fit for multiple policies
Published: 2024-11-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
To address the biodiversity crisis, global and regional policy frameworks like the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the European Green Deal demand to monitor biodiversity. Despite these efforts, existing approaches for monitoring biodiversity remain fragmented and lack data integration. Here, we review and synthesize crucial information for developing an integrated European-wide [...]
Time will tell: the temporal and demographic contexts of plant-soil microbe interactions
Published: 2024-10-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Soil microorganisms can have profound impacts on plant community dynamics and have received increasing attention in the context of plant-soil feedback. The effects of soil microbes on plant community dynamics are classically evaluated with a two-phase experimental design that consists of a conditioning phase, during which plants modify the soil microbial community, and a response phase, during [...]
Exploring bird biodiversity: a survey of avian richness in the dams of oke-ogun, nigeria
Published: 2024-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Wetland degradation, both natural and anthropogenic, impacts biodiversity and ecosystem services. Artificial wetlands, such as dams, may help mitigate the loss of natural wetlands, but their conservation potential is understudied. This research explores avian diversity, anthropogenic impacts, and community perceptions of bird species across three dams -Igboho, Okeho, and Kishi located in [...]
Priced out of belonging? Insufficient concessions on membership fees across international societies in ecology and evolution
Published: 2024-10-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Learned societies, as professional bodies for scientists, are an integral part of the scientific system. However, their membership fees have the potential to be prohibitive to the most vulnerable members of the scientific community. To shed light on how membership fees are structured, we conducted a survey of 182 international learned societies relevant to researchers in ecology and evolution. We [...]
Overcoming Key Challenges of Satellite-based Monitoring of Ecosystem Condition: A Continental-scale Example From Australia
Published: 2024-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Effective satellite-based monitoring of ecosystem integrity or condition needs to address four key challenges: (a) context dependency; (b) alternative ecological states; (c) short-term temporal ecosystem dynamics; and (d) scarcity of reference data where ecosystems retain high levels of integrity. Here we present a typology, and outline strengths and weaknesses, of different approaches to mapping [...]
Sodium sulfite can reliably induce chemical hypoxia without toxic effects in the model sea anemone species, Exaiptasia diaphana
Published: 2024-10-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is accelerating the deoxygenation of aquatic ecosystems, making understanding its effects on biological processes critical. An emerging method for inducing hypoxia during experimentation utilizes sodium sulfite to scavenge oxygen, however it remains unclear if hypoxia-inducing concentrations of sodium sulfite are toxic to aquatic species. We decoupled sodium sulfite’s potential [...]
Decadal recovery of fungal but not termite deadwood decay in tropical rainforest
Published: 2024-10-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Deadwood represents ~11% of carbon stocks in tropical rainforest ecosystems and its decay is driven largely by fungi and termites which contribute to the cycling of carbon and nutrients. Due to land use change, such as forest clearing, secondary growth tropical rainforests are increasingly prevalent around the globe. In secondary growth rainforest, studies found lower decay rates of leaf [...]