237 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 study demonstrates that coordinated governance strategies, combined with moderate livestock intensification, can effectively redirect projected soybean expansion in Brazil away from native vegetation in the Amazon, Cerrado, and Pantanal toward already converted lands, thereby preventing significant deforestation while maintaining agricultural output.
Although monitoring data from Nitmiluk National Park (2005–2018) revealed some annual changes in mammal fauna, a significant reduction in survey effort prevented the identification of clear patterns linking these changes to fire regimes, highlighting the critical need for future monitoring to be better aligned with management goals and local stakeholders.
This paper develops a mathematical model to demonstrate that intercropping can either suppress or exacerbate vector-borne plant virus outbreaks depending on specific host characteristics, while also identifying conditions to prevent both persistent and transient disease transmission for sustainable crop management.
Human land-use change in Southeast Asia, particularly the proliferation of artificial nest farms, drives the co-occurrence of ecologically similar swiftlets and swallows primarily through environmental filtering that homogenizes niches, rather than through increased competition or breakdowns in niche partitioning.
This paper proposes science-based operational criteria and specific thresholds for the three main indicators (native species, deadwood, and large/old trees) to effectively identify and protect old-growth forests in northern Europe, ensuring compliance with EU Biodiversity and Forest Strategies while minimizing misclassification.
This study demonstrates that three co-flowering Mediterranean *Aristolochia* species achieve pollinator specificity through distinct floral volatile organic compounds that elicit specific electrophysiological responses, thereby reducing reproductive interference despite the presence of both specific and non-specific dipteran pollinators.
Based on a 25-year study of 84 bird species in Poland, this paper demonstrates that long-term landscape heterogeneity is the primary driver of avian population dynamics, exerting a stronger positive influence than climate factors while urbanization and rapid environmental shifts consistently hinder population growth.
Using a massive in situ dataset of 18 million organisms, this study reveals that plankton exhibit non-random, attraction-driven distributions at centimeter scales, suggesting that these fine-scale spatial patterns serve as a novel metric for understanding ecological interactions and shaping marine ecosystems.
This study demonstrates that in the widespread grass *Phragmites australis*, nutrient resorption efficiency is genetically canalized by phylogeographic lineage and geographic origin rather than being plastically adjusted in response to severe salt stress, implying that global change predictions for nutrient cycling must account for the evolutionary history of plant populations.
This study demonstrates that rare plants in gypsum-rich steppes make a significant contribution to local biodiversity conservation, as their rarity and ecological specialization do not necessarily correlate with lower arthropod diversity or interaction singularity compared to widespread species.