Preprints
There are 2709 Preprints listed.
The effect of single versus successive warm summers on an intertidal community
Published: 2024-05-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
To accurately predict how organisms and ecological communities will respond to future conditions caused by climate change, we must consider the temporal dynamics of environmental stressors, including the effects of repeated exposures to stress. We performed a two-year passive thermal manipulation in coastal British Columbia, Canada to determine how intertidal communities responded to single and [...]
Why wild herbivores raid crops: alternative hypotheses and their differential implications for mitigation of human wildlife conflict
Published: 2024-05-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Wild herbivores devouring crops is a major issue in human wildlife conflict. Although there is substantial literature that identifies the conflict, tries to estimate the extent of economic loss, its consequences and also suggests some mitigation measures, many fundamental issues remain unaddressed. A number of speculations about the root causes behind the problem have been made but they haven’t [...]
A Gene-Culture Co-Evolutionary Perspective on the Puzzle of Human Twinship
Published: 2024-05-20
Subjects: Biological and Physical Anthropology, Evolution, Maternal and Child Health, Population Biology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Natural selection should favor litter sizes that optimize trade-offs between brood-size and offspring viability. Across the primate order, modal litter size is one, suggesting a deep history of selection favoring minimal litters. Humans, however---despite having the longest juvenile period and slowest life-history of all primates---still produce twin-births at appreciable rates, even though such [...]
Ten golden rules for restoration to secure resilient and just seagrass social-ecological systems
Published: 2024-05-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology, Plant Sciences
It is unequivocal that the world has lost a significant proportion of its seagrass, and although glimmers of hope exist, losses continue with many ongoing negative trajectories. First and foremost, we need to put the world on a global pathway to seagrass net gain. Conservation of what remains must be a priority, but we need to increase coverage at rates unlikely to be achieved naturally; [...]
A minimum data standard for wildlife disease research and surveillance
Published: 2024-05-19
Subjects: Animal Diseases, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Diseases, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Parasitic Diseases, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Virology, Virus Diseases
Rapid and comprehensive data sharing is vital to the transparency and actionability of wildlife infectious disease research and surveillance. Unfortunately, most best practices for publicly sharing these data are focused on pathogen determination and genetic sequence data. Other facets of wildlife disease data – particularly negative results – are often withheld or, at best, summarized in a [...]
Persistent effects of landscape connectivity on recruitment dynamics in secondary forests
Published: 2024-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Large scale reforestation is promoted as an important strategy to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. A persistent challenge for efforts to restore ecosystems at scale is how to accelerate ecological processes, particularly natural regeneration. Yet, despite being recognized as an important barrier to the recovery of diverse plant communities in agricultural landscapes, the impacts of [...]
Temperature dependence of pollen germination and tube growth in conifers relates to their distribution along an elevational gradient in Washington State, USA
Published: 2024-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
•Background and Aims: Pollen germination and tube growth are essential processes for successful fertilization. They are among the most temperature-vulnerable stages and subsequently affect seed production and determine population persistence and species distribution under climate change. Our study aims to investigate intra- and inter-specific variations in the temperature dependence of pollen [...]
How is the effectiveness of terrestrial protected areas to conserve biodiversity measured? A systematic map
Published: 2024-05-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Protected areas (PAs) are fundamental in preserving ecological diversity, supporting ecosystem services, and mitigating human impacts in today’s world. However, the mere designation of PAs is insufficient for achieving conservation goals. It needs to be ensured through employment of robust management practices and the deployment of scientifically sound monitoring methodologies. This systematic [...]
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 [...]