429 papers
Ecology explores the intricate relationships between living organisms and their environments, revealing how life adapts, interacts, and sustains itself across the planet. From microscopic soil communities to vast migratory patterns, this field examines the delicate balance that keeps ecosystems functioning and resilient. Understanding these connections is vital for addressing urgent challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss.
At Gist.Science, we make the latest research from bioRxiv accessible to everyone. We process every new preprint in this category as it appears, offering both clear plain-language explanations and detailed technical summaries to suit every reader. This approach ensures that groundbreaking findings in ecological science are not locked behind complex terminology but are available for immediate understanding and discussion.
Below are the latest papers in ecology, curated to help you stay informed about the evolving story of life on Earth.
This paper introduces a computational pipeline that constructs generalized Lotka-Volterra-based community assembly graphs to quantify the topography of assembly pathways, enabling the analysis of alternative stable states, non-equilibrium dynamics, and historical contingency in empirical ecological systems without relying on restrictive global stability assumptions.
This study demonstrates that shrill carder bumble bee (*Bombus sylvarum*) queens rely heavily on specific floral species like *Lamium album* and *Trifolium repens* early in the season before broadening their diet, suggesting that targeted conservation efforts to maintain these key plants are crucial for supporting colony establishment and reversing population declines.
This study introduces and validates an energy balance model that accurately predicts primate-induced fruit loss in tropical agroforests by calculating species-specific metabolic needs, offering a practical tool for quantifying agricultural damage to support evidence-based financial compensation schemes.
This study demonstrates that American black bear habituation drives distinct shifts in gut microbiome composition and function, specifically leading to elevated levels of antimicrobial resistance genes and inflammatory taxa compared to wild and captive counterparts.
This paper presents a comprehensive, consensus-weighted fuzzy classification database for Australian aquatic plants that standardizes taxonomic nomenclature and aggregates existing data to provide transparent, evidence-based Water Plant Functional Group (WPFG) assignments while retaining uncertainty for flexible research applications.
This study introduces a novel 4- to 5-parameter Bayesian model that accurately characterizes salinity-dependent growth curves in photosynthetic microbes, revealing strong habitat-specific adaptations and providing a standardized framework for comparing species traits and predicting community responses to salinity gradients.
This study challenges the reliability of soil seed bank classifications by demonstrating that approximately 8% of species deemed "transient" can actually survive over a decade of storage, suggesting that methodological limitations and ecological filters—particularly favoring large-seeded, low-production species that are easily missed in field surveys—often lead to the erroneous underestimation of seed persistence.
This study utilized Bayesian hierarchical spatial models to predict the county-level relative abundance of three medically important tick species across Illinois, revealing distinct geographic distributions and environmental drivers while identifying priority areas for future surveillance in data-sparse regions.
Using a 60-year dataset from Finland, this study demonstrates that local forest loss and its interaction with changing late spring climatic conditions, particularly rainfall and snow depth, significantly drive the extinction probability of the threatened boreal orchid *Calypso bulbosa*.
This study demonstrates that eDNA detection of terrestrial mammals at savanna waterholes is highly effective and influenced by a combination of species-specific traits (such as trophic level and social group size), behavioral interaction intensity with water, and substrate type, with sediment samples capturing long-term activity and water samples reflecting recent interactions.