Preprints
There are 2486 Preprints listed.
Cooler and drier conditions increase parasitism in subtropical damselfly populations
Published: 2023-09-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Host-parasite interactions are impacted by climate, which may result variation of parasitism across landscapes and time. Understanding how parasitism varies across these spatio-temporal scales is crucial to predicting how organism will respond to and cope under a rapidly changing climate. Empirical work on how parasitism varies across climates is limited. Here, we examine the variation of [...]
Functional trait dataset of benthic macroinvertebrates in South Korean streams
Published: 2023-09-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Functional traits are the result of evolution and adaptation, providing important ecological insights into how organisms interact with their environment. Benthic macroinvertebrates, in particular, have garnered attention as biomonitoring indicators for freshwater ecosystems. This study presents a functional trait dataset for benthic macroinvertebrates, comprising 447 taxa (393 at genus level, 53 [...]
Metaweb approaches for understanding complex ecological interactions: A Review
Published: 2023-09-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
A metaweb is the regional pool of potential interactions, capturing the gamma diversity of species and interactions. A metaweb enables the generation of local webs from species occurrence data by subsampling contained interactions, thereby allowing insights into alpha and beta diversities with minimal data requirements. Moreover, understanding ecological interactions is critical for a complete [...]
KF-metaweb: A trophic metaweb of freshwater ecosystems of South Korea
Published: 2023-09-20
Subjects: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Motivation: The metaweb is a dictionary of nodes and their potential interactions developed for a particular region, focusing on a particular type of ecosystem. Based on the local biodiversity information at different spatial and temporal scales, the regional metaweb can be easily decomposed into local webs. The generated local webs are useful for understanding spatiotemporal variations in [...]
Invasion trends: An interpretable measure of change is needed to support policy targets
Published: 2023-09-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) calls for a 50% reduction in rates of invasive alien species establishment by 2030. However, estimating changes in rates of introduction and establishment is far from straightforward, particularly on a national scale. Variation in survey effort over time, the absence of data on survey effort, and aspects of the invasion process itself [...]
Candy Darter: Background, Threats, and Conservation for an Endangered Fish
Published: 2023-09-20
Subjects: Environmental Policy, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Candy darters, once abundant in the West Virginia and Virginia water basins, now require substantial conservation efforts due to habitat destruction and hybridization with the variegate darter species. Direct human effects have also escalated the destruction of candy darter habitats, making the protection of this important species and what remains of their habitat of utmost importance. With the [...]
Sources of confusion in global biodiversity trends
Published: 2023-09-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Populations and ecological communities are changing worldwide, and empirical studies exhibit a mixture of either declining or mixed trends. Confusion in global biodiversity trends thus remains while being of major social, political, and scientific importance. Part of this variability may arise from the difficulty to reliably assess global biodiversity trends. Here, we conducted a literature [...]
Time since first naturalization is key to explaining non-native plant invasions on islands
Published: 2023-09-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim Investigating the extent of insular invasions by non-native species (i.e. the number of islands they occupy) is central to island conservation. However, interrelationships among plant life history traits, naturalization histories, and island characteristics in determining island occupancy by non-native plant species are poorly understood. We investigated whether island occupancy by different [...]
Plant mutations, beyond the clichés
Published: 2023-09-18
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
A global analysis reveals the dynamic relationship between sexual selection and population abundance in space and time
Published: 2023-09-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
Sexual selection leads to the evolution of extravagant weaponry or ornamental displays, with the bearer of these traits gaining a reproductive advantage, potentially at a cost to the individual’s survival. The consequences of sexual selection can therefore impact species demographic processes and overall abundance. Currently, evidence connecting the effects of sexual selection to demography and [...]
Spatially explicit predictions of food web structure from regional level data
Published: 2023-09-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Knowledge about how ecological networks vary across global scales is currently limited given the complexity of acquiring repeated spatial data for species interactions. Yet, recent developments of metawebs highlight efficient ways to first document possible interactions within regional species pools. Downscaling metawebs towards local network predictions is a promising approach to use current [...]
Monitor indicators of genetic diversity from space using Earth Observation data
Published: 2023-09-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
By providing images of the globe, measured frequently across several optical domains, in the form of public data, EO has high potential to facilitate and advance biodiversity monitoring. However, there is currently a consensus that EO cannot contribute to monitoring genetic diversity. Here, we challenge this consensus by explaining how EO can help to develop the headline and complementary [...]
Towards integrating and standardising information on plant invasions across Australia
Published: 2023-09-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Over the last decades, terminology to refer to invasion status along the introduction-naturalisation-invasion continuum have been based either on overcome barriers or on impact-based frameworks, generating debates within the scientific community. The lack of agreement with regards to definitions have sometimes hampered combining information from sources based on different criteria. In Australia, [...]
Towards a unified framework for studying behavioural tolerance to anthropogenic disturbance
Published: 2023-09-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Animals vary in how much they respond to risk and the extent to which they can modify their responsiveness over time. How and why animals vary has important consequences for understanding demographic and evolutionary responses to novel or rapidly changing environments. Behavioural tolerance is seen when animals do not have any or have a limited behavioural reaction to a potentially risky [...]
Lasting effects of avian-frugivore interactions on seed dispersal and seedling establishment
Published: 2023-09-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. The consequences of plant-animal interactions often transcend the mere encounter stage, as those encounters are followed by a chain of subsequent stages on the plant’s reproductive cycle that ultimately determine fitness. Yet, the dissemination and recruitment stages of animal-mediated seed dispersal are seldom analysed jointly, hindering a full understanding of the ecology of seed [...]