Preprints
There are 1657 Preprints listed.
A protocol for reproducible functional diversity analyses
Published: 2021-10-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The widespread use of species traits to infer community assembly mechanisms or to link species to ecosystem functions has led to an exponential increase in functional diversity analyses, with >10,000 papers published in 2010–2019, and >1,500 papers only in 2020. This interest is reflected in the development of a multitude of theoretical and methodological frameworks for calculating [...]
Data rescue: saving environmental data from extinction
Published: 2021-10-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Historical and long-term environmental datasets are imperative to understanding how natural systems respond to our changing world. Although immensely valuable, these data are at risk of being lost unless actively curated and archived on data repositories. The practice of data rescue, which we define as identifying, preserving, and sharing valuable data and associated metadata at risk of loss, is [...]
Mexican agricultural frontier communities differ in forest dynamics with consequences for conservation and restoration
Published: 2021-10-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Forest regrowth is key to achieve restoration commitments, but a general lack of understanding when it occurs and how long secondary forests persist, hampers effective upscaling. We quantified spatiotemporal forest dynamics in a recently colonized agricultural frontier in southern Mexico, and tested how temporal variation in climate, and cross-community variation in land ownership, land quality [...]
Mobbing in animals: a thorough review and proposed future directions
Published: 2021-10-26
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Communication, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Mobbing is an important anti-predator behavior where prey harass and attack a predator to lower the immediate and long-term risk posed by predators, warn others, and communicate about the predator’s threat. While this behavior has been of interest to humans since antiquity, and aspects of it have been well researched for the past 50 years, we still know little about its ecology and the [...]
A force competition of predator on urban ecosystem
Published: 2021-10-25
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Definitely the fact, is an undeniable impact of habitat change and fragmentation in the urban ecosystem take effect to species loss causes population decline into local extinction. The results that emerged from habitat selection in ecology in this case study may suggest possible opportunistic of population turnover are caused by behaviour adaptive in the life-history of predators. And provides [...]
Sex-dependent effects of parental age on offspring fitness in a cooperatively breeding bird
Published: 2021-10-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Parental age can have considerable effects on offspring phenotypes and health. However, intergenerational effects may also have longer-term effects on offspring fitness. Few studies have investigated parental age effects on offspring fitness in natural populations while also testing for sex- and environment-specific effects. Further, longitudinal parental age effects may be masked by [...]
Sperm-dependent asexual species matter in ecology and evolution
Published: 2021-10-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
In a world of metazoans, where sexual reproduction vastly predominates, asexual organisms are nonetheless very important. The aim of this review is to show that asexuals can have general effects on other species, ecosystems and biological networks via mechanisms that deserve more attention. These include 1) impact on the genepool of coexisting sexual species by either restricting their population [...]
Arboreal locomotion and trophic security at the dawn of Euprimate vision
Published: 2021-10-23
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology
Primate vision is thought to have evolved in connection with life in the trees. However, several inter-related origins theories—those addressing possible co-evolution with size, predation, diet, daylight, locomotion, and groups—also provide reasonable explanations of their distinct cranial-visual morphology. We hypothesized that demand for high-speed landings in arboreal environments facilitated [...]
Genetic variation in non-structural carbohydrates in Plantago lanceolata is related to mowing intensity but not to regrowth ability
Published: 2021-10-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs) are important storage reserves of plants, and they may play a key role in the plants’ ability to recover from disturbance events such as drought, fire, or biomass removal. In managed grasslands, plants regularly experience aboveground biomass removal by grazing or mowing. If NSCs influence plant tolerances to these damages, then land-use intensification could [...]
Ecology and conservation of a living fossil: Australias Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis)
Published: 2021-10-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Horticulture, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Pathology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The iconic Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis) is a critically endangered Australian conifer and one of the world’s rarest trees with only 46 mature individuals remaining in the wild. The species is regarded as a ‘living fossil’ and was discovered on the brink of extinction following a natural historical decline. While its discovery has enabled crucial intervention for its long-term conservation, it [...]
NCBITaxonomy.jl - rapid biological names finding and reconciliation
Published: 2021-10-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
NCBITaxonomy.jl is a package designed to facilitate the reconciliation and cleaning of taxonomic names, using a local copy of the NCBI taxonomic backbone (Federhen 2012, Schoch et al. 2020); The basic search functions are coupled with quality-of-life functions including case-insensitive search and custom fuzzy string matching to facilitate the amount of information that can be extracted [...]
The Invention of Fistfighting
Published: 2021-10-21
Subjects: Anthropology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
It has been hypothesized that key aspects of human male upper limb and facial morphology evolved through selective pressures related to fistfighting. Based on the primatological, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence, I argue these proposals are misguided. An important trend during recent hominin evolution was a decline in upper body strength and facial robusticity, coinciding in part with [...]
Causes and consequences of variation in early-life telomere length in a bird metapopulation
Published: 2021-10-16
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Physiology
1. Environmental conditions during early-life development can have lasting effects on individual quality and fitness. Telomere length (TL) may correlate with early-life conditions and may be an important mediator or biomarker of individual quality or pace-of-life, as periods of increased energy demands can increase telomere attrition due to oxidative stress. Thus, knowledge of the mechanisms that [...]
Transcription factors evolve faster than their structural gene targets in the flavonoid pigment pathway
Published: 2021-10-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Evolutionary transitions in flower color often trace back to changes in the flavonoid biosynthetic pathway and its regulators. In angiosperms, this pathway produces a range of red, purple, and blue anthocyanin pigments. Transcription factor (TF) complexes involving members of the MYB, bHLH, and WD40 protein families control the expression of pathway enzymes. Here, we investigate flavonoid pathway [...]
Ocean acidification and bivalve byssus: explaining variable responses using meta-analysis
Published: 2021-10-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Numerous studies have documented weakened byssal attachment strength under ocean acidification (OA); however, a comparable number report no effect, even within the same species. We used meta-analysis to explore factors that could potentially explain observed effect size variation in byssal attachment strength following OA exposure. A systematic literature search uncovered 19 studies [...]