Preprints
There are 2536 Preprints listed.
Potentiality of Metal Nanoparticles in Precision and Sustainable Agriculture
Published: 2024-08-08
Subjects: Agriculture, Life Sciences
The world’s increasing population has a higher demand for food and a suitable environment. However, using conventional farming methods and industrial agrochemicals leads to environmental risk, which is a significant threat for the next generation. So, nanotechnology can be a blessing for saving our environment and producing risk-free foods at minimal cost in an eco-friendly way. Nanoparticles [...]
Three Paths Through the Levels of Selection
Published: 2024-08-08
Subjects: Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Statistical Models, Zoology
Should we really predict the response of wild endotherms to climate change based on thermal responses measured in captivity?
Published: 2024-08-07
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Life Sciences
A database of foraging guilds of seabirds
Published: 2024-08-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
The foraging guilds of terrestrial birds have been a focus of past studies, however little is known about the guilds in seabirds, except for certain species and localities. To overcome this gap, here we developed the Foraging Guilds of Seabirds database (FGSdb) by compiling a global database of 311 seabird species (from a total of 346 known, representing 90% of all seabird species) and assigning [...]
What do functional diversity, redundancy, rarity, and originality actually measure? A theoretical guide for ecologists and conservationists
Published: 2024-08-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Functional diversity, redundancy, rarity, and originality are fundamental concepts in ecology and conservation biology. Despite their frequent use, the precise meaning and relationships between these measures are often unclear. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive theoretical framework to elucidate what each of these measures captures and how they interrelate. By integrating traditional [...]
Inductive link prediction facilitates the discovery of missing links and enables cross-community inference in ecological networks
Published: 2024-08-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Predicting species interactions (links) within ecological networks is crucial for advancing our understanding of ecosystem functioning and responses of communities to environmental changes. Transductive link prediction models are often used but are constrained by sparse, incomplete data and are limited to single networks. We address these issues using an inductive link prediction (ILP) approach. [...]
Assembly Graph as the Rosetta Stone of Ecological Assembly
Published: 2024-08-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Ecological assembly---the process of ecological community formation through species introductions---has recently seen exciting theoretical advancements across dynamical, informational, and probabilistic approaches. However, these theories often remain inaccessible to non-theoreticians, and they lack a unifying lens. Here, I introduce the assembly graph as an integrative tool to connect [...]
An integrated population modelling workflow for supporting mesopredator management
Published: 2024-08-01
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Survival Analysis, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Expanding populations of mesopredators threaten biodiversity and human health in many ecosystems across the world. Lethal control through harvest is commonly implemented as a mitigation measure, yet its effects on mesopredator population dynamics in interaction with compensatory mechanisms and environmental conditions has rarely been assessed quantitatively due to data constraints. Recent [...]
New frontiers in AI for biodiversity research and conservation with multimodal language models
Published: 2024-08-01
Subjects: Biodiversity
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into biodiversity research and conservation is growing rapidly, demonstrating great potential in reducing the intensive human labor required for data preprocessing, thereby, facilitating larger data collections that offer ecological insights at unprecedented scales. However, most of these AI applications for biodiversity are still in the early [...]
Evolutionary rescue by aneuploidy in tumors exposed to anti-cancer drugs
Published: 2024-07-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Life Sciences
Evolutionary rescue happens when a population survives a sudden environmental change that initially causes the population to decline toward extinction. A prime example of evolutionary rescue is the ability of cancer to survive exposure to treatment. One evolutionary mechanism by which a population of cancer cells can adapt to chemotherapy is aneuploidy. Aneuploid cancer cells can be fitter in an [...]
The Conguillío Statement on the values and responsibilities of ecologists
Published: 2024-07-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Amid global environmental crises threatening the survival of many species, including our own, a diverse group of scientists from 15 countries and members of 16 professional and academic societies, concerned with the current global environmental crisis met in February 2024 to address the urgent need to reflect on, and identify, our core values and responsibilities as individual professionals and [...]
Seasonal Migrants and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in a Region of Risk: The Pulse Seine Fisheries in Limfjorden, Denmark, c. 1740-1860
Published: 2024-07-31
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Biodiversity, Economic History, Environmental Studies, Marine Biology, Other Arts and Humanities, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
This article presents the commercial scale and organization of the Danish pulse seine eel fishery in the Limfjord before the advent of modern offshore fisheries. Partly, for environmental concerns, the pulse seine fishery was tightly regulated, with every seine having to be checked and certified by the local district bailiffs. Here, we present the first in-depth analysis of all preserved [...]
Ongoing collapse of avifauna in temperate oceanic islands close to the mainland in the Anthropocene
Published: 2024-07-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Oceanic island ecosystems are highly vulnerable to human activity. Furthermore, oceanic islands close to the mainland provide distinct perspectives on natural processes, including overseas dispersal from the mainland. However, the effects of overseas dispersal and human activity on insular community changes have not been empirically demonstrated. 2. To clarify the mechanisms driving changes in [...]
The benefits of hierarchical ecosystem models: demonstration using a new state-space mass-balance model EcoState
Published: 2024-07-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ecosystem models predict changes in productivity and status for multiple species, and are important for incorporating climate-linked dynamics in ecosystem-based fisheries management. However, fishery regulations are primarily informed by single-species stock assessment models, which estimate unexplained variation in dynamics (e.g., recruitment, survival, fishery selectivity, etc) using random [...]
A review of professional ecological societies’ values, missions, and ethics
Published: 2024-07-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The rapid decline in Earth’s biodiversity poses significant threats to nature and human well-being. Human activities such as land use change, pollution, climate change, invasive species, and overexploitation drive this crisis, endangering millions of species and affecting critical habitats and ecosystems. This study investigates the role of professional ecological societies in addressing the [...]