Preprints
There are 2386 Preprints listed.
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Tropical Northwestern Atlantic
Published: 2024-05-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Tropical Northwestern Atlantic is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Bahamian, Carolinian, Eastern Caribbean, Floridian, Greater Antilles, Northern Gulf of Mexico, Southern Caribbean, Southern Gulf of Mexico, Southwestern Caribbean and Western Caribbean. The mapped extent of mangroves in 2020 [...]
Monitoring the land and sea: Enhancing efficiency through CRISPR-Cas driven depletion and enrichment of environmental DNA
Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Characterising biodiversity using environmental DNA (eDNA) represents a paradigm shift in our capacity for biomonitoring complex environments, both aquatic and terrestrial. However, eDNA biomonitoring is limited by biases towards certain species and the low taxonomic resolution of current metabarcoding approaches. Shotgun metagenomics of eDNA enables the collection of whole ecosystem data by [...]
Proactive management outperforms reactive strategies for wildlife disease control
Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Finding effective pathogen mitigation strategies is one of the biggest challenges humans face today. In the context of wildlife, emerging infectious diseases have repeatedly caused widespread host morbidity and population declines of numerous taxa. In areas yet unaffected by a pathogen, a proactive management approach has the potential to minimize or prevent host mortality. However, we typically [...]
Designing causal mediation analyses to quantify intermediary processes in ecology
Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistical Methodology
Ecologists seek to understand the intermediary ecological processes through which changes in one attribute in a system affect other attributes. A causal understanding of mediating processes is important for testing theory and developing resource management and conservation strategies. Yet, quantifying the causal effects of these mediating processes in ecological systems is challenging, because it [...]
Simple and robust models of ecological abundance
Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Counts of species in ecological samples are of interest when they tell us about community assembly processes. Older process-based models of count distributions are either complex, widely rejected, or not able to predict high unevenness. 2. I leverage a general strategy for deriving simple one-parameter models. A distribution of abundances x on a continuous scale is predicted from a [...]
Factors Influencing Support for Bat Management and Conservation in the Wildland-Urban Interface
Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about bats often underlie social support for bat management and intentions to conserve bats. Effective bat conservation and management hinges on understanding these drivers across contexts. Lands classified as wildland-urban interface (WUI) are rapidly expanding in the USA, increasing the likelihood of human-bat interactions from management practices and [...]
Evidence for avian core-Merge is indisputable: A reply to Beckers et al. (2024)
Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
It has been hypothesized that the generative power of language stems from a cognitive capacity called “Merge,” which enables senders to combine two linguistic items (e.g., two words or two phrases) into a sequence and receivers to recognize it as a single unit (Chomsky, 1995, 2001). In an experimental study published in Nature Communications (Suzuki and Matsumoto, 2022), we demonstrated that a [...]
Microevolutionary change in wild stickleback: using integrative time-series data to infer responses to selection
Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Identifying microevolutionary change in the wild requires linking trait change to shifts in allele fre-quencies, but existing approaches poorly account for different modes of selection that act simulta-neously on correlated traits. Using an integrative phenome-genome time-series dataset collected on wild threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), we identified how different modes of [...]
Brownification shapes the food web of aquatic invertebrates: a review
Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Brownification, a global phenomenon of increasing surface water colour to yellow-brown hues, has an array of effects on drinking water supply and aquatic biodiversity. Aquatic invertebrates, as indicators of aquatic ecosystem health and providers of ecosystem services, have received limited attention in the context of water browning. In this review, we explored the effects of brownification on [...]
Uncovering multiple influences on space use by deer mice using NEON data
Published: 2024-05-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences
Space use by animals is affected by multiple factors; previous researchers have examined the effects of influences such as sex, body condition, and population density on home range area. However, evaluating the simultaneous influences of multiple factors on animal space use has been relatively intractable due to sample size limitations. We capitalize on National Ecological Observatory Network [...]
Revised molecular phylogenetic analysis of Leucheria Lag. sensu lato (Asteraceae; Nassauvieae) and implications for morphological and ecological evolution
Published: 2024-05-10
Subjects: Biodiversity
In a preceding work, I reanalyzed published ribosomal and plastome DNA sequence data for selected species of Leucheria Lag. and related Nassauvieae (Asteraceae). I reported that the genus Polyachyrus Lag. is phylogenetically nested within Leucheria, hence I transferred species of the former into the latter. I also demonstrated that the monotypic Oxyphyllum Phil. pertains to the Leucheria crown [...]
Advancing single species abundance models: robust models for predicting abundance using co-occurrence from communities
Published: 2024-05-10
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biology
Accurate estimates of abundance are crucial for successful conservation and management. However, gathering abundance data is costly. Species Abundance Models (SAMs) are increasingly used to predict variation in abundance for resource management for single species, but collecting enough relevant environmental information to build effective SAMs can often be challenging. Species co-occurrence [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of New Zealand
Published: 2024-05-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mangroves of New Zealand is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Central New Zealand, Northeastern New Zealand and Three Kings-North Cape. Their mapped extent in 2018 was 281.7 to 296.2 km2, representing 0.2% of the global mangrove area. The biota is characterized by a single species: Avicennia marina subsp. [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of South India and Sri Lanka, and Maldives
Published: 2024-05-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mangroves of South India and Sri Lanka, and Maldives is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Western India, South India and Sri Lanka, and Maldives. The mapped extent in 2020 was 249.2 km2, representing 0.2% of the global mangrove area. The environmental settings of this ecoregion differ widely ranging from open [...]
A wrap-around movement path randomization method to distinguish social and spatial drivers of animal interactions
Published: 2024-05-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Studying the spatial-social interface requires tools that distinguish between social and spatial drivers of interactions. Testing hypotheses regarding the factors determining animal interactions often involves comparing observed interactions with reference or ’null’ models. One approach to accounting for spatial drivers of social interactions in reference models is randomizing animal [...]