Preprints
There are 1657 Preprints listed.
Desert Locust in India: The 2020 invasion and associated risks
Published: 2020-06-01
Subjects: Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Animal Sciences, Entomology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning, Zoology
Wind direction, often used in forecasting locust migration, indicates a non-zero probability of desert locust invasion in eastern Indian states. Apart from present controlling measures, we are additionally suggesting to be cautious about the eggs of locust as the rainfall associated with Super Cyclone Amphan has created a favorable breeding ground for the gregarious locust. Also reverse migration [...]
SYSTEMATICS OF CALANDRINIA PILOSIUSCULA DC A.K.A. CALANDRINIA COMPRESSA SCHRAD. EX DC (MONTIACEAE–MONTIOIDEAE)
Published: 2020-05-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences
Calandrinia compressa Schrad. ex DC (Prodr. 3: 359. 1828) is the name currently widely applied to a polymorphic annual species of Calandrinia sect. Calandrinia endemic to the Chilean Floristic Region. A total of ten validly published heterotypic names plus six horticultural designations (and orthographic variants thereof) have been considered at some point as taxonomically the same as C. [...]
A guide to using the Internet to monitor and quantify the wildlife trade
Published: 2020-05-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
The unrivalled growth in e-commerce of animals and plants presents an unprecedented opportunity to monitor wildlife trade to inform conservation, biosecurity, and law enforcement. Using the Internet to quantify the scale of the wildlife trade (volume, frequency) is a relatively recent and rapidly developing approach, which currently lacks an accessible framework for locating relevant websites and [...]
Local landscape position impacts demographic rates in a widespread North American steppe bunchgrass
Published: 2020-05-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
[this article now published at Ecosphere: https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.3351] Understanding the environmental drivers of demographic rates and population dynamics over space and time is critical for anticipating how species will respond to climate change. While the influence of temporal environmental variation and large environmental gradients are well recognized, less is known about how local [...]
Tongue spots of dunnock nestlings vary in number and position over time but exert no clear influence on parental allocation
Published: 2020-05-15
Subjects: Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The nestlings of many bird species have ornaments in their mouths (e.g., tongue spots), yet the within-species variation of these ornaments remains poorly explored. Here, we described a subtle and intriguing pattern of variation in the tongue spots of dunnock (Prunella modularis) nestlings and further evaluated their potential influence on parental feeding allocation. We observed that tongue [...]
Crowdsourcing global perspectives in ecology using social media
Published: 2020-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Transparent, open, and reproducible research is still far from routine, and the full potential of open science has not yet been realized. Crowdsourcing––defined as the usage of a flexible open call to a heterogeneous group of individuals to recruit volunteers for a task ––is an emerging scientific model that encourages larger and more outwardly transparent collaborations. While crowdsourcing, [...]
Fieldwork in landscape ecology
Published: 2020-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Fieldwork has played a critical role in the development of landscape ecology, and it remains essential for addressing contemporary challenges such as understanding the landscape ecology of global change. Advances in technology have expanded the scope of fieldwork to include the deployment of drones and other sensors, and in recent years, researchers have expressed concerns that traditional [...]
Small-scale farming in drylands: New models for resilient practices of millet and sorghum cultivation
Published: 2020-05-11
Subjects: Agriculture, Life Sciences, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Finger millet, pearl millet and sorghum are amongst the most important drought-tolerant crops worldwide. They constitute primary staple crops in drylands, where their production is known to date back over 5000 years ago. Compared to other crops, millets and sorghum have received less attention until very recently, and their production has been progressively reduced in the last 50 years. Here, we [...]
Associations between habitat quality and body size in the Carpathian land snail Vestia turgida: species distribution model selection and assessment of performance.
Published: 2020-05-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Associations between habitat quality and body size in the Carpathian land snail Vestia turgida: species distribution model selection and assessment of performance. Tytar V., Baidashnikov O. – Species distribution models (SDMs) are generally thought to be good indicators of habitat suitability, and thus of species’ performance, consequently SDMs can be validated by checking whether the areas [...]
Rapid-warming tolerance correlates with tolerance to slow warming but not growth at non-optimal temperatures in zebrafish
Published: 2020-05-08
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Life Sciences, Physiology
Global warming is predicted to increase both acute and prolonged thermal challenges for aquatic ectotherms. Severe short and medium-term thermal stress over hours to days may cause mortality, while longer sub-lethal thermal challenges may cause performance declines. The interrelationship between the responses to short, medium and longer thermal challenges is unresolved. We asked if the same [...]
Why spatial scale matters in predicting synchrony of ecological disruption
Published: 2020-05-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Arising from: C. Trisos et al. Nature 580, 496–501, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2189-9 (2020). ABSTRACT The fundamental assumption behind this provocative study (Trisos et al. 2020) is that current and future climatic tolerance limits for a species can be inferred from the last 170 years of climate records within its current distribution. Using this approach, the authors project the [...]
Climate change as a catalyst of social evolution
Published: 2020-05-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Anthropogenic climatic change will be a major factor shaping natural populations over the foreseeable future. The scope of this issue has spawned the integrative field of global change biology, which is chiefly concerned with identifying vulnerabilities of natural systems to climate change and integrating these into models of biodiversity loss. Meanwhile, there remains considerable latitude for [...]
Mapping the past, present and future research landscape of paternal effects
Published: 2020-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Medicine and Health Sciences, Physiology
Although in all sexually reproducing organisms, an individual has a mother and a father, non-genetic inheritance has been predominantly studied in mothers. Paternal effects have been far less frequently studied, until recently. In the last five years, research on environmentally induced paternal effects has grown rapidly in the number of publications and diversity of topics. Motivations for [...]
Assessing Raspberry Shake and Boom sensors for recording African elephant acoustic vocalizations
Published: 2020-05-06
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
In this work we assess the performance of the Raspberry Shake and Boom (RS&B) sensor package for detecting and monitoring African elephants (Loxodonta africana). This is the first documented test of this particular unit for recording animal behaviour; the unit was originally designed for detecting tectonic earthquakes and low frequency (<50 Hz) atmospheric acoustics. During a four day [...]
Strengthening the evidence base for temperature-mediated phenological asynchrony and its impacts
Published: 2020-05-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Climate warming has caused the seasonal timing of many components of ecological food chains to advance (Thackeray et al. 2010, 2016). Differential shifts lead to phenological asynchrony, often referred to as trophic mismatch when it is detrimental for consumers (Cushing 1990). In the context of trophic interactions, it has been suggested that consumers will shift their phenology to adapt to [...]