Preprints
There are 2486 Preprints listed.
Landscape changes in the “valli da pesca” of the Venice lagoon and possible effects on the Ecosystem Services supply
Published: 2023-06-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Nature and Society Relations, Other Environmental Sciences, Remote Sensing, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Coastal lagoons have long been subject to continuous changes caused by mutual interactions with human activities. Monitoring such changes becomes critical, particularly when modifications in landscape and land cover classes can affect their capacity to ensure Ecosystem Services (ESs). In the Venice lagoon, some confined areas called “valli da pesca” supply provisioning ESs, namely aquaculture and [...]
Community-based conservation and restoration in coastal wetlands: A review
Published: 2023-06-19
Subjects: Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Research has shown that conservation and restoration efforts that engage local communities are more successful at meeting stated goals than those that are externally controlled. Such participatory management approaches have been increasingly applied in coastal wetland ecosystems, yet our collective understanding of the scope of methods applied and outcomes observed in these efforts is limited. In [...]
Griffon Vultures restrict movements around roosts and supplementary feeding stations, even when carrion is available on the field: a call for wind energy zonation to avoid ecological traps on Mediterranean islands
Published: 2023-06-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Engineering
Wind energy is developing on Mediterranean islands, where endangered populations of Griffon Vulture (Gyps fulvus) occur. As griffons are subjected to collisions with wind turbines while foraging, it is necessary to understand which factors affect their movements, to minimize the potential impact of wind farms. We assessed habitat use by 37 griffons (n. GPS locations = 130,218) and its overlap [...]
Hypotheses on the extended phenotype of the mitochondrion: sex, mortality, and aging
Published: 2023-06-19
Subjects: Biology, Evolution
How did sex evolve, how is sex evolutionary stable, and why do eukaryotes appear mortal. This paper presents a mitochondrial perspective on the evolution of the eukaryotic cell that appears capable of answering these questions. Rather than viewing a mitochondrion as a passive entity taken up by an archaeal host that remains in the driving seat, mitochondria are viewed as the key force [...]
Plant diversity dynamics over space and time in a warming Arctic
Published: 2023-06-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Plant Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average, and plant communities are responding through shifts in species abundance, composition and distribution. However, the direction and magnitude of local plant diversity changes have not been quantified thus far at sites across the Arctic. Using a compilation of 42,234 records of 490 vascular plant species from 2,174 plots at 45 study [...]
Salinity controls rocky intertidal community structure via suppression of herbivory
Published: 2023-06-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change impacts ecosystems directly through differences in species specific responses as well as indirectly through changes to the strength of species interactions. To predict how species will be impacted by ongoing environmental change, we need to better understand the relative roles of these direct and indirect effects. Salinity is a strong driver of ecological patterns and processes, [...]
Links between an insectivorous bird and moths disentangled through national scale monitoring data
Published: 2023-06-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Insects play important roles in food chains, but quantifying how insect abundance affects population dynamics in natural communities is challenging. National scale monitoring data provides opportunities to identify trophic relationships at broad spatial and temporal scales but requires careful approaches to link data from different schemes. Here, using two monitoring datasets from Great Britain, [...]
The essential role of essential variables in biodiversity and ecosystem services reporting within and across jurisdictions
Published: 2023-06-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fragmented systems for monitoring and assessing biodiversity and ecosystem services limit countries’ ability to track progress across multilateral environmental agreements, coordinate actions, and thus meet agreed upon global commitment. This paper initiates to address this gap through integrated data-to-decision workflows for more synergistic implementation of global goals. We propose Essential [...]
Plio-Pleistocene African megaherbivore losses associated with community biomass restructuring
Published: 2023-06-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
Fossil abundance data can reveal ecological dynamics underpinning taxonomic declines. Using fossil dental metrics, we reconstructed body mass and mass-abundance distributions in Late Miocene to recent African large mammal communities. Despite collection biases, fossil and extant mass-abundance distributions are highly similar, with unimodal distributions likely reflecting savanna environments. [...]
Language Inclusion in Ecological Systematic Reviews and Maps: Barriers and Perspectives
Published: 2023-06-09
Subjects: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Systematic reviews and systematic maps are considered the most reliable form of research evidence in science, but they often neglect non-English-language literature. Non-English-language literature can provide important evidence, especially in ecological studies, which may also influence findings and alter conclusions. To understand the barriers that might limit authors’ ability or intent to find [...]
Advances in biologging can identify nuanced energetic costs and gains in predators
Published: 2023-06-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Foraging is a key driver of animal movement patterns, with specific challenges for predators which must search for mobile prey. These patterns are increasingly impacted by global changes, principally in land use and climate. Understanding the degree of flexibility in predator foraging and social strategies is pertinent to wildlife conservation under global change, including potential top-down [...]
Anticoagulant rodenticides are climbing the food chain to the top: a first proof of widespread positivity in grey wolves (Canis lupus)
Published: 2023-06-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health
Second-generation Anticoagulant Rodenticides (ARs) can be particularly critical for large carnivores, due to their widespread use and time-delayed impacts on their populations. While many studies explored the impacts of ARs on small and mesocarnivores, no study explored the extent to which they could contaminate large carnivores in anthropized landscapes of Europe. We filled this gap by [...]
Academic publishing requires linguistically inclusive policies
Published: 2023-06-05
Subjects: Biology, International and Intercultural Communication, Scholarly Publishing
Scientific knowledge is produced in multiple languages but is predominantly published in English. This academic publishing practice creates a language barrier to the generation and transfer of scientific knowledge between communities with diverse linguistic backgrounds, hindering the ability of scholars and communities to address global challenges and achieve diversity and equity in science, [...]
Queering ecology: (Re)Constructing ecology as a home to better understand the social-ecological pressures of wildlife
Published: 2023-06-01
Subjects: Arts and Humanities
Homes are intimate spaces where many bodies come together in space and time to deeply learn and understand the many processes that have created one another. Ecology, the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment, is based on the study of a home. Yet, ecologists are trained in patriarchal, heteronormative, and otherwise Western articulations and understandings of nature [...]
Post-fire reference densities for giant sequoia seedlings
Published: 2023-06-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
In some areas burned by recent wildfires, most or all giant sequoias were killed. Sequoia managers wish to know whether post-fire seedling establishment in those areas has been adequate to regenerate the locally extirpated sequoias. To provide a yardstick for interpreting sequoia seedling densities measured after the recent severe wildfires, here we calculate mean seedling densities measured [...]