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Preprints

There are 2536 Preprints listed.

Evaluation of livelihoods programming in Biodiversity Challenge Funds projects

Thomas Alex Hilton

Published: 2024-07-12
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Economics

The UK government's Biodiversity Challenge Funds (BCF; including Darwin Initiative, Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund, and Darwin Plus) have funded hundreds of conservation projects across the Global South since the early 1990s. Increasingly, these projects include goals relating to human livelihoods, recognising the complex interrelationships between poverty reduction and biodiversity [...]

Exposure to lead (Pb) contamination paradoxically heightens predator avoidance behaviours in an urban bird

Heung Ying Janet Chik, Joseph F Di Liberto, Max M Gillings, et al.

Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences

To survive, prey animals must correctly assess and respond to predation, by vigilantly scanning their environment for threats, assessing predation risk through gaze aversion (responding fearfully to predator gaze), and escaping efficiently. As these anti-predatory behaviours are integrated through the nervous and motor systems, they could be disrupted by neurotoxic contaminants, such as lead [...]

A pattern-oriented simulation for forecasting species spread through time and space: A case study on an ecosystem engineer on the move

Rahil Jasminkumar Amin, Jessie C. Buettel, Matthew Fielding, et al.

Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Modelling the spread of introduced ecosystem engineers is a conservation priority due to their potential to cause irreversible ecosystem-level changes. Existing models predict potential distributions and spread capacities, but new approaches that simulate the trajectory of a species’ spread over time are needed. We have developed novel simulations that predict spatial and temporal spread, [...]

Marine resources alter tundra food web dynamics by subsidizing a terrestrial predator on the sea ice

Sean M Johnson-Bice, Frank B. Baldwin, Evan S Richardson, et al.

Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology

Predator use of resource subsidies can strengthen top-down effects on prey when predators respond numerically to subsidies. Although allochthonous subsidies are generally transported along natural gradients, consumers can cross ecosystem boundaries to acquire subsidies, thereby linking disparate ecosystems. In coastal Arctic ecosystems, terrestrial predators like Arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus) [...]

Blindingly Transparent – Anonymity in an Era of Openness: A Reply to Cardini

Shinichi Nakagawa, Malgorzata Lagisz

Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Life Sciences

We welcome and appreciate the comment from Cardini [1] on our “ABC of academic writing” [2]. Cardini rightly points out that some of our advice could lead to revealing one’s identity inadvertently, jeopardising the double-blind peer review process. Importantly, there is a wealth of evidence that the effectiveness of double-blind review can prevent biases resulting from traditional single-blind [...]

Ancestral state reconstruction of phenotypic characters

Liam J. Revell

Published: 2024-07-09
Subjects: Evolution

Ancestral state reconstruction is a phylogenetic comparative method that involves estimating the unknown trait values of hypothetical ancestral taxa at internal nodes of a phylogenetic tree. Ancestral state reconstruction has long been, and continues to remain, among the most popular analyses in phylogenetic comparative research. In this review, I illustrate the theory and practice of ancestral [...]

Social ageing varies within a population of bottlenose whales

Sam Froman Walmsley, Laura J Feyrer, Claire Girard, et al.

Published: 2024-07-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

How social behaviour changes as individuals age has important consequences for the health and function of both human and non-human societies. However, the extent of inter-individual variation in social ageing has been underappreciated, especially in natural populations of animals. Here, we leverage a photo-identification dataset spanning 35 years to examine social ageing in an Endangered [...]

The Genomics for Australian Plants (GAP) framework initiative – developing genomic resources for understanding the evolution and conservation of the Australian flora.

Lalita Simpson, David Cantrill, Margaret Byrne, et al.

Published: 2024-07-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Genomics

The generation and analysis of genome-scale data—genomics—is driving a rapid increase in plant biodiversity knowledge. However, the speed and complexity of technological advance in genomics presents challenges for its widescale use in evolutionary and conservation biology. Here, we introduce and describe a national-scale collaboration conceived to build genomic resources and capability for [...]

Variation in the diversity of Sotalia (Cetacea:Delphinidae) dolphin whistle repertoires at a continental scale

Gabriel Melo-Santos, Sam Froman Walmsley, Volker B. Deecke, et al.

Published: 2024-07-08
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences

1. While cetaceans are known to produce large and complex acoustic repertoires, the challenges of exhaustively sampling sounds at sea and counting relevant signals has precluded an understanding of their true repertoire diversity. 2. Here we quantify and compare the whistle repertoires of 16 populations in the genus Sotalia, belonging to two sister species, the Guiana dolphin (Sotalia [...]

Non-compliance and Under-performance in Australian Human-induced Regeneration Projects

Andrew Macintosh, Megan Catherine Evans, Don Butler, et al.

Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

The ‘boom-and-bust’ nature of rangeland ecosystems makes them ill-suited to nature-based solution (NbS) carbon offset projects involving sequestration in vegetation and soils. The variability in these systems makes it difficult to determine whether observed carbon stock changes are attributable to project activities, creating additionality risks. The low and variable rainfall in rangelands also [...]

Detection of energetic equivalence depends on food web architecture and estimators of energy use

Poppy Joaquina Romera, Benoit Gauzens, Ana Carolina Antunes, et al.

Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Ecologists have long debated the universality of the energetic equivalence rule (EER), which posits that population energy use should be invariant with average body size due to negative size–density scaling. We explored size–density and size–energy use scaling across 183 geographically–distributed soil invertebrate food webs to investigate the universality of these fundamental EER assumptions. [...]

Linguistic evolution in time and space: addressing the methodological challenges

Chundra Cathcart, Balthasar Bickel

Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences

One of the most specific features of the human language faculty is its intrinsic spatio-temporal dynamic, as reflected in languages' characteristic mode of extra-genomic evolution. Understanding what has emerged in the hominin lineage therefore requires capturing this dynamic and the diversity of languages and structures that it generates. In this chapter, we review the state of the art in [...]

Microbial functional diversity and redundancy: moving forward

Pierre Ramond, Pierre Galand, Ramiro Logares

Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Microbiology

Microbial functional ecology is expanding as we can now measure the traits of wild microbes that affect ecosystem functioning. Here, we review techniques and advances that could be the bedrock for a unified framework to study microbial functions. We then explore the technical, ecological, and evolutionary processes that could explain environmental patterns of microbial functional diversity and [...]

Physical Trait Variation in Hass Avocados Across Different Fruit Sizes

Juan Opazo, Gonzalo Riadi

Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Life Sciences

Hass avocados are globally consumed, nutrient-rich fruits. While current analyses mainly benefit the industry, there is a need for research focused on consumer advantages. Understanding the statistical relationships between the physical characteristics of avocados, particularly pulp content, can help consumers make better purchasing decisions. This study examines the physical attributes of Hass [...]

Strong small-scale differentiation but no cryptic species within the two isopod species Asellus aquaticus and Proasellus coxalis in a restored urban river system (Emscher, Germany)

Martina Weiss, Armin W. Lorenz, Christian K. Feld, et al.

Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Zoology

Worldwide, humans have strongly altered river networks. Key changes resulted in modified hydromorphology, poor habitat quality and availability, migration barriers, and pollution. Restoration measures aim at mitigating anthropogenic stressors and to restore connectivity, but the biological success of the measures is not guaranteed. Analyzing genetic diversity and population structure of target [...]

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