Preprints
There are 2180 Preprints listed.
A toolkit for the dynamic study of air sacs in siamang and other elastic circular structures
Published: 2023-10-14
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology
Biological structures are defined by rigid elements, such as bones, and elastic elements, like muscles and membranes. Computer vision advances have enabled automatic tracking of moving animal skeletal poses. Such developments provide insights into complex time-varying dynamics of biological motion. Conversely, the elastic soft-tissues of organisms, like the nose of elephant seals, or the buccal [...]
Synthesis of sexual selection: a systematic map of meta-analyses with bibliometric analysis
Published: 2023-10-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Sexual selection has been a popular subject within evolutionary biology because of its central role in explaining odd and counterintuitive traits observed in nature. Consequently, the literature associated with this field of study became vast. Meta-analytical studies attempting to draw inferences from this literature have now accumulated, varying in scope and quality, thus calling for a synthesis [...]
Agriculture alters the ancestral phenological plasticity to spring warmth in a forest specialist, but not in its generalist sister species
Published: 2023-10-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phenological adjustment is the first line of adaptive response of vertebrates when ancestral seasonality is disrupted by climate change. The prevailing response is to reproduce earlier in warmer springs, but habitat changes, such as conversion of ancestral (pre-human) habitats into cities and agricultural lands, are expected to affect phenological plasticity, for example due to loss of [...]
Distribución de anfibios en un bosque urbano tropical en Venezuela: Implicaciones para el manejo de parques urbanos
Published: 2023-10-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Zoology
Mundialmente cada vez es más relevante el rol de parques y jardines urbanos en la educación ambiental y valoración de los esfuerzos de conservación. Comprender cuáles factores afectan la calidad del hábitat de los anfibios permite tomar decisiones acertadas para manejar estos espacios, conciliando objetivos recreacionales con los de conservación. Evaluamos la comunidad de anfibios en un sector [...]
Paying it forward: Crowdsourcing of taxonomic harmonization and linking of biodiversity identifiers
Published: 2023-10-10
Subjects: Biodiversity
Linking records for the same taxa between different databases is an essential step when working with biodiversity data. However, name-matching alone is error-prone, because of issues such as homonyms (unrelated taxa with the same name) and synonyms (same taxon under different names). Therefore, most projects will require some degree of curation to ensure that taxon identifiers are correctly [...]
Sex-specific effects of social environment on behaviour and their correlations in Drosophila melanogaster
Published: 2023-10-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Environmental and individual experiences can result in immediate and persistent changes in behaviour. Often, such effects are also sex-dependent. Interspecific interactions can be one of the most important environments an individual faces. Such social interactions are expected to affect a suite of behavioural traits and their correlations. Here, we used Drosophila melanogaster and high-throughput [...]
Withdrawn: Datathons: fostering equitability in data reuse in ecology
Published: 2023-10-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Duplicate of https://doi.org/10.32942/X2389Q
Should we indulge prawns more on organismal and environmental research?
Published: 2023-10-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
The importance of prawns in organismal research is an issue of concern due to their multifaceted and unique biological characteristics. This majorly includes their tolerance to critical environmental situations, sensitivity, exceptional body morphometrics, ecogeographic occurrence and diversity. All of these make prawns a highly adaptable and evolutionary successful organism. While studying the [...]
With a little help from my friends: the roles of microbial symbionts in insect populations and communities.
Published: 2023-10-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
To understand insect abundance, distribution, and dynamics, we need to understand the relevant drivers of their populations and communities. While microbial symbionts are known to affect many aspects of insect biology, research on their ecological and evolutionary importance for wild non-model insects is scarce. We are still far from understanding the spatio-temporal dynamics of symbioses in [...]
Same data, different analysts: variation in effect sizes due to analytical decisions in ecology and evolutionary biology
Published: 2023-10-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Although variation in effect sizes and predicted values among studies of similar phenomena is inevitable, such variation far exceeds what might be produced by sampling error alone. One possible explanation for variation among results is differences among researchers in the decisions they make regarding statistical analyses. A growing array of studies has explored this analytical variability in [...]
Comparing the effects of internal stem damage on aboveground biomass estimates from terrestrial laser scanning and allometric scaling models
Published: 2023-10-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Forests and woodlands are critical carbon stores, and methods for quantifying forest aboveground biomass (AGB) are increasingly relied upon for determining sequestered CO2 traded in carbon markets. AGB is traditionally measured using allometric models, yet terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is emerging as a highly accurate remote sensing alternative. However, internal tree stem damage from biotic [...]
Bacteriostatic cells instead of bacteriostatic antibiotics?
Published: 2023-10-03
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
This year we commemorate the centennial of the birth of the mature concept of bacteriostasis by John W. Churchman at Cornell University Medical School. The term bacteriostasis has primarily been applied to antibiotics (bacteriostatic antibiotics). In this Opinion paper, we are revisiting this concept by suggesting that bacteriostatic antibiotics are drugs that induce bacteria to become [...]
Hypotheses on Evolutionary Processes for Autonomous and Cooperative Mechanisms of Living Systems to Work and Evolve
Published: 2023-10-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
The internal systems of an organism are composed of many different systems of matter, phase flows, and networks that coordinate and function together to regulate the organism's autonomy and responsiveness to the external world. These systems have evolved through interactions between organisms and their environment. This study proposes several hypotheses that explain and generalize the mechanisms [...]
Robust point and variance estimation for ecological and evolutionary meta-analyses with selective reporting and dependent effect sizes
Published: 2023-10-03
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Statistics and Probability
Meta-analysis produces a quantitative synthesis of evidence-based knowledge, shaping not only research trends but also policy and practices in ecology and evolution. However, two statistical issues, selective reporting and statistical dependence, can severally distort meta-analytic evidence. Here, we propose a two-step procedure to tackle these challenges concurrently and re-analyse 448 [...]
Decoding Populations in the Ocean Microbiome
Published: 2023-09-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding the characteristics and structure of populations is fundamental to comprehending ecosystem processes and evolutionary adaptations. While the study of animal and plant populations has spanned a few centuries, microbial populations have been under scientific scrutiny for a considerably shorter period. In the ocean, analyzing the genetic composition of microbial populations and their [...]