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.
A resurvey of northern pika populations in Hokkaido, Japan, reveals that while rising summer temperatures drive upslope range shifts and local extinctions, habitat size is an even stronger determinant of the species' persistence, highlighting the critical need for preserving large, heterogeneous habitats to ensure long-term viability.
This study reveals that in an Antarctic cold seep, methane oxidation is primarily driven by denitrification-dependent anaerobic oxidizers and aerobic methanotrophs rather than the typical sulfate-reducing ANME-SRB consortium, highlighting a unique and widespread methane sink mechanism in the Ross Sea.
This study demonstrates that the application of the bacterial strain *Arthrobacter pascens* 13LEP5, particularly in combination with *Bradyrhizobium japonicum* and plant-derived protein hydrolysate, effectively mitigates drought and cold stress in soybeans by improving biometric parameters and pigment indices during both early development and post-stress recovery.
This study demonstrates that while nutrient environments significantly influence both amino acid auxotrophy and cross-feeding dynamics in *E. coli* and *B. subtilis*, the outcomes of cross-feeding are most strongly predicted by the specific type of auxotrophy and species identity rather than environmental context alone.
This paper proposes a new "Aitchison CTI" that preserves the algebraic structure of compositional data to provide a more robust classification of species' thermal affinities and a reliable measure of community temperature change, addressing the limitations of existing indices through theoretical derivation and empirical validation.
A survey of 101 French tree and forest professionals reveals that while they possess varying levels of knowledge about regulated pests and value citizen science platforms for information, they underutilize these tools for active reporting, showing greater receptivity to monitoring established species than for the early detection of quarantine pests.
This paper demonstrates that the resilience of successional communities is primarily governed by a single "bottleneck" stage with the lowest effective exit rate, suggesting that management efforts should target this specific stage to most effectively accelerate ecological recovery.
This paper introduces a simulation-based framework, implemented in the R package *intersimR*, that effectively distinguishes genuine behavioral responses (attraction and following) from incidental co-occurrence in marine animal-vessel interactions, revealing that while fishing vessels constitute a small fraction of traffic, they drive the majority of significant interactions with Scopoli's shearwaters.
This paper proposes a seasonal transmission framework for determining when it is safe to relax interventions at the end of an outbreak, demonstrating that accounting for seasonal decline in transmission—such as in the 2017 Italy chikungunya outbreak—allows for more timely decision-making by significantly reducing the required waiting period after the last observed case compared to models based solely on incidence data.
This study demonstrates that in temperate forests, vertical stratification drives asymmetric ecological effects where canopy conditions disproportionately shape understorey consumer communities through a top-down flow of resources, while local layer conditions primarily filter abundance and trophic interactions remain largely compartmentalized within vertical strata.