Preprints
There are 1975 Preprints listed.
Dataset of seized wildlife and their intended uses
Published: 2021-07-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) threatens conservation and biosecurity efforts. The Internet has greatly facilitated the trade of wildlife, and researchers have increasingly examined the Internet to uncover illegal trade. However, most efforts to locate illegal trade on the Internet are targeted to one or few taxa or products. Large-scale efforts to find illegal wildlife on the Internet [...]
Autocorrelation-informed home range estimation: a review and practical guide
Published: 2021-07-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Modern tracking devices allow for the collection of high-volume animal tracking data at improved sampling rates over VHF radiotelemetry. Home range estimation is a key output from these tracking datasets, but the inherent properties of animal movement can lead traditional statistical methods to under- or overestimate home range areas. 2. The Autocorrelated Kernel Density Estimation (AKDE) [...]
Flotsam and jetsam: a global review of the role of inputs of marine organic matter in sandy beach ecosystems
Published: 2021-07-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Sandy beaches are iconic interfaces that functionally link the ocean with the land by the flow of marine organic matter. These cross-ecosystem fluxes often comprise uprooted seagrass and dislodged macroalgae that can form substantial accumulations of detritus, termed ‘wrack’, on sandy beaches. In addition, the tissue of the carcasses of marine animals that regularly wash up on beaches form a rich [...]
Impact of Developmental Temperatures On The Repeatability of Thermal Plasticity in Metabolic Rate
Published: 2021-07-05
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Phenotypic plasticity is an important mechanism that allows populations to adjust to changing environments. Plastic responses induced by early life experiences can have lasting impacts on how individuals respond to environmental variation later in life (i.e., reversible plasticity). Developmental environments can also influence repeatability of plastic responses thereby altering the capacity for [...]
Re-examining extreme sleep duration in bats: implications for sleep phylogeny, ecology and function
Published: 2021-07-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology
Bats are quoted as sleeping for up to 20 hours a day, an example of extreme sleep duration amongst mammals. Given that duration is one of the primary metrics featured in comparative studies of sleep, it is important that determinations of species-specific sleep duration are well founded. Here, we summarise the evidence for the characterisation of bats as extreme sleepers and discuss whether it [...]
Plant herbivore protection by arbuscular mycorrhizas: A role for fungal diversity?
Published: 2021-07-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
The symbiotic association between arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi and terrestrial plants can enhance plant defences against insect herbivores. Despite advances in our understanding of how AM fungi affect plant tolerance and resistance based defence mechanisms, we contend that the role of fungal diversity in these interactions continues to be largely overlooked. This is problematic considering [...]
Invasive goby larvae: First evidence as stowaways in small watercraft motors.
Published: 2021-07-02
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences
Aquatic invasive species (AIS) are a major threat to freshwater and marine ecosystems worldwide. Despite management efforts, human assisted dispersal continues to distribute AIS within and across waterbodies. An understudied translocation vector for AIS, especially for invasive fish, are the cooling systems of small watercraft motors. Here, we investigate the contents of boat motor cooling [...]
Restored off-channel pond habitats create thermal regime diversity and refuges within a Mediterranean-climate watershed
Published: 2021-07-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Cool-water habitats provide increasingly vital refuges for cold-water fish living on the margins of their historical ranges; consequently, efforts to enhance or create cool-water habitat are becoming a major focus of river restoration practices. However, the effectiveness of restoration projects for providing thermal refuge and creating diverse temperature regimes at the watershed scale remains [...]
The dynamics of dominance: open questions, challenges, and solutions
Published: 2021-07-01
Subjects: Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Although social hierarchies are recognized as dynamic systems, they are typically treated as static entities for practical reasons. Here, we ask what we can learn from a dynamical view of dominance, and provide a research agenda for the next decades. We identify five broad questions at the individual, dyadic, and group levels, exploring the causes and consequences of individual changes in rank, [...]
From meta-system theory to the sustainable management of rivers in the Anthropocene
Published: 2021-06-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Ecological processes occurring at the regional scale, such as the dispersal of organisms, and spatial flows of material and energy are fundamental for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in river networks, yet they remain largely overlooked in most river management practices and underlying policies. We propose a meta-system approach where regional processes acting at different [...]
Green Anole lizards (Anolis carolinensis) deposit eggs in nests of the Trap Jaw Ant, Odontomachus brunneus
Published: 2021-06-29
Subjects: Entomology, Life Sciences
Squamates eggs are rarely found in ant nests, and are largely restricted to the nests of neotropical fungus gardening in the tribe Attini. Ponerine ant nests have not previously been reported as nesting cavities for squamates, including the Green Anole (Anolis carolinensis). The current study reports the association of Green Anole eggs and hatchlings with the subterranean nest chambers of the [...]
A review of the heterogeneous landscape of biodiversity databases: opportunities and challenges for a synthesized biodiversity knowledge base
Published: 2021-06-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Abstract Aim: Addressing global environmental challenges requires access to biodiversity data across wide spatial, temporal and biological scales. Recent decades have witnessed an exponential increase of biodiversity information aggregated by biodiversity databases (hereafter ‘databases’). However, heterogeneous coverage, protocols, and standards of databases hampered the data integration among [...]
Aboveground carbon stocks in Madagascar’s vanilla production landscape – exploring rehabilitation through agroforestry in the light of land-use history
Published: 2021-06-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Forests and tree-dominated land uses store large amounts of carbon stocks in plant biomass. However, anthropogenic changes in land use and land cover decrease tree cover and associated carbon stocks. Agroforestry has the potential to maintain or restore carbon in plant biomass but the amount will be influenced by various factors that may include land-use history and management practices. However, [...]
Deep learning as a tool for ecology and evolution
Published: 2021-06-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Deep learning is driving recent advances behind many everyday technologies, including those relying on speech and image recognition, natural language processing, and autonomous driving. It is also gaining popularity in biology, where it has been used for automated species identification, environmental monitoring, behavioral studies, DNA sequencing, and population genetics and phylogenetics, among [...]
Seasonally variable relationships between surface water temperature and inflow in the upper San Francisco Estuary
Published: 2021-06-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Water temperature and inflow are key environmental drivers in aquatic systems that are linked through a causal web of factors including climate, weather, water management, and their downstream linkages. However, we do not yet fully understand the relationship between inflow and water temperature, especially in complex managed systems such as estuaries. The San Francisco Estuary is the center of a [...]