312 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.
Contrary to the prevailing view that phenotypic plasticity buffers species against environmental collapse, this study demonstrates through a novel mathematical framework that the feedback mechanisms between organism and population can actually induce tipping points, thereby increasing the risk of abrupt and irreversible population shifts.
This study analyzes 11 years of fisheries acoustic data in the California Current System to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of mid-trophic level organisms, revealing distinct cross-shore, seasonal, and latitudinal patterns in acoustic backscatter and exploring their relationships with environmental variables.
This study reveals that metabolic activity in diverse microbial communities follows a long-tailed lognormal distribution where a small fraction of highly active cells disproportionately drives ecosystem respiration, demonstrating that ignoring this metabolic inequality can lead to significant biases in predicting large-scale biogeochemical dynamics.
This study demonstrates that semi-synthetic ergosterol-derived compounds, particularly compound 4 for serine proteinases and compounds 2 and 3 for phospholipase A2, effectively inhibit key *Bothrops asper* venom enzymes through hydrophobic and electrostatic interactions, suggesting their potential as adjuvants for treating snakebite-induced local damage.
This study introduces a generalized tuning framework for the BirdFlow model that integrates eBird distribution data with multiple individual-tracking sources (GPS, banding, and telemetry) to generate biologically realistic, continental-scale population-level migration forecasts for 153 North American bird species, including data-limited species modeled via taxonomically informed hyperparameter transfer.
This study demonstrates that the physicochemical stability of field-collected mosquito breeding water during laboratory storage is significantly influenced by ambient humidity and temperature, necessitating strict environmental standardization and parameter monitoring to ensure bioassay reproducibility.
By analyzing metabolic processes across 1,100 global reefs, this study reveals that coral reef ecosystem functions exist on a continuous, context-dependent spectrum with uncoupled benthic and fish communities, demonstrating that natural variability and local conditions often outweigh human impacts and necessitating tailored conservation strategies over universal benchmarks.
The paper introduces CoralBlox, a computationally efficient and mechanistic discrete-time model designed to support rapid decision-making in coral reef management by simulating key ecological processes and validating against Great Barrier Reef data to evaluate diverse conservation strategies under climate change.
This study reveals that while the estuarine sea anemone *Nematostella vectensis* shares a core set of heat-stress genes across its geographic range, its transcriptional responses to temperature extremes vary significantly by latitude, with northern populations showing distinct cold-response patterns and southern populations exhibiting unique heat-response mechanisms driven by differential transcription factor binding.
This paper demonstrates that additive habitat-amount models fail to reliably infer independent configuration effects in observational datasets because habitat loss and configuration are geometrically coupled in a nonlinear, asymmetric manner, meaning that near-zero fragmentation coefficients reflect statistical artifacts of this coupling rather than a true absence of ecological impact.