Preprints
There are 1657 Preprints listed.
Urbanization negatively impacts frog diversity at continental, regional, and local scales
Published: 2021-05-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Urban environments are novel ecosystems, with increased chemical, sound, and light pollution differentially impacting many animals. Understanding the impacts of urban environments on biodiversity is the first step to understanding how to best mitigate biodiversity losses in an increasingly urbanizing world. Analyses with broad geographic and taxonomic coverage can offer critical context for [...]
Social capital: an independent dimension of healthy ageing
Published: 2021-05-25
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Physiology, Public Health, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Zoology
Resources that are embedded in social relationships, such as shared knowledge, access to food, services, social support or cooperation, are all examples of social capital. Social capital is recognized as an important age-related mediator of health in humans and of fitness-related traits in animals. A rich social capital in humans can slow senescence and reverse age-related deficits. Animals have [...]
Seasonality, niche management, and vertical migration in landscapes of relief
Published: 2021-05-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Landscapes of vertical relief, such as mountains and continental slopes, intensify ecological and climatological variation within narrow spatial windows. Seasonal vertical migrants exploit this variation during their residence in, and movements between, vertically stratified seasonal ranges. Animals in terrestrial, marine, and even human-ecological systems undergo similar patterns of seasonal [...]
Individualised niches: an integrative conceptual framework across behaviour, ecology, and evolution
Published: 2021-05-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Individuals differ. This seemingly trivial statement has nevertheless led to paradigm shifts, as three different fields of organismal biology have seen a marked change in key concepts over the past few decades. In animal behaviour, it has increasingly been realised that behavioural differences among individuals can be stable over time and across contexts, giving rise to the concept of animal [...]
Understanding plant microbiomes requires a G x E framework
Published: 2021-05-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Plant microbiomes have become one of the hottest topics in plant biology. Driven by the increased availability of metagenome sequencing methods, analyses of plant-associated microbiomes have been skyrocketing during the last decade. They have generally taken one of two main perspectives: (1) a focus on the microbiome itself, where researchers describe microbiome diversity and attempt to [...]
Species comparison of among- and within-individual variation and correlations
Published: 2021-05-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Individuals frequently differ consistently from one another in their average behaviors (i.e. “animal personality”) and in correlated suites of consistent behavioral responses (i.e. “behavioral syndromes”). However, understanding the evolutionary basis of this (co)variation has lagged behind demonstrations of its presence. This lag partially stems from comparative methods rarely being used in the [...]
Current applications and future promise of genetic/genomic data for conservation in an Aotearoa New Zealand context
Published: 2021-05-20
Subjects: Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
The field of conservation biology has a long history of incorporating diverse disciplines into its ‘toolbox’ for improved outcomes. One such discipline is conservation genomics, which has experienced fast-paced growth and development over the last decade, and offers exciting opportunities to help achieve the vision outlined in Aotearoa New Zealand’s national strategy for biodiversity, Te Mana o [...]
Report on Ocean Frontier Institute Workshop on Fisheries Management Reference Points in Highly Dynamic Ecosystems
Published: 2021-05-19
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
A virtual international workshop on fisheries management reference points in highly dynamic ecosystems was held from January 25-29, 2021. Its purpose was to provide a general overview of the theory and implementation of dynamic reference points to inform fisheries management. This workshop report includes motivation, background, challenges, workshop objectives, keynote presentation summaries, [...]
Slow improvement to the archiving quality of open datasets shared by researchers in ecology and evolution
Published: 2021-05-19
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Many leading journals in evolution and ecology now mandate open data upon publication. Yet, there is very little oversight to ensure the completeness and reusability of archived datasets, and we currently have a poor understanding of the factors associated with high quality (FAIR) data-sharing. We assessed 362 open datasets linked to first- or senior-authored papers published by 100 principal [...]
Global Kelp Forest Restoration: Past lessons, status, and future goals
Published: 2021-05-18
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Kelp forest ecosystems and their associated ecosystem services are declining around the world. In response, marine managers are working to restore and counteract these declines. Kelp restoration first started in the 1700s in Japan and since then has spread across the globe. Restoration efforts, however, have been largely disconnected, with varying methodologies trialled by different actors in [...]
Large-scale cooperation in small-scale foraging societies
Published: 2021-05-18
Subjects: Anthropology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We present evidence that people in small-scale, mobile hunter-gatherer societies cooperated in large numbers to produce collective goods. Foragers engaged in large-scale communal hunts, constructed shared capital facilities; they made shared investments in improving the local environment; and they participated in warfare, alliance, and trade. Large-scale collective action often played a crucial [...]
Using evolutionary functional-structural plant modelling to understand the effect of climate change on plant communities
Published: 2021-05-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
The “holy grail” of trait-based ecology is to predict the fitness of a species in a particular environment based on its functional traits, which has become all the more relevant in the light of global change. However, current ecological models are ill-equipped for this job: they rely on statistical methods and current observations rather than the mechanisms that determine how functional traits [...]
A practical guide to question formation, systematic searching and study screening for literature reviews in ecology and evolution
Published: 2021-05-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
1. Well-conducted systematic reviews are invaluable for synthesizing research findings. The conclusions of a review depend on how the research question was formulated, how relevant studies were found, and how studies were selected for synthesis. 2. Here, we present a practical guide for ecologists and evolutionary biologists on formulating a question for a systematic review, and finding a [...]
The ghost of hosts past: impacts of host extinction on parasite specificity
Published: 2021-05-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A growing body of research is focused on the extinction of parasite species in response to host endangerment and declines. Beyond the loss of parasite species richness, host extinction can impact apparent parasite host specificity, as measured by host richness or the phylogenetic distances among hosts. Such impacts on the distribution of parasites across the host phylogeny can have knock-on [...]
Evaluating ecological uniqueness over broad spatial extents using species distribution modelling
Published: 2021-05-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim: Local contributions to beta diversity (LCBD) can be used to identify sites with high ecological uniqueness and exceptional species composition within a region of interest. Yet, these indices are typically used on local or regional scales with relatively few sites, as they require information on complete community compositions difficult to acquire on larger scales. Here, we investigated how [...]