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.
Using MaxEnt modeling under low and high emission scenarios, this study predicts that climate change will significantly reshape global benthic amphipod distributions by 2100, with species-specific responses mediated by feeding ecology and driven by distinct environmental variables, ultimately threatening the functional composition and ecological roles of marine benthic communities.
A 36-year analysis in Hwange National Park reveals that wetlands with short hydroperiods are experiencing significant water surface declines driven by rising temperatures, posing a threat to associated vegetation and wildlife conservation.
This study reveals that pervasive genomic islands serve as major dynamic drivers of giant virus evolution by facilitating extensive genome plasticity, mosaicism, and host adaptation through frequent rearrangements and large-scale genetic exchange with bacteria.
By integrating machine learning and Bayesian modeling on over 41,000 plant observations, this study demonstrates that combining environmental conditions with a host's prior infection history significantly improves the prediction of disease risk and reveals that pathogen-pathogen interactions can be as critical as abiotic factors in driving seasonal epidemics.
Through a structured decision-making process involving a population model, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and US Fish and Wildlife Service identified a sustainable recovery strategy for the endangered Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit that prioritizes expanding conservation breeding, continuing annual RHDV2 vaccinations, and targeting translocations to establishing recovery areas while also emphasizing habitat protection and improved monitoring.
This study reveals that soil rewetting and phosphorus amendment drive divergent successional patterns in viral communities, where wet-up triggers a shift from persistent virions to active infections while phosphorus specifically enhances infection dynamics and host-virus coupling among transcriptionally active viruses.
By integrating seafloor imagery, bathymetry, and oceanographic modeling, this study identifies steep geomorphological features in the Weddell Sea's Powell Basin as critical biodiversity hotspots that concentrate vast benthic populations through specific interactions with cold bottom waters and ocean circulation, providing a scalable framework for conservation in a warming Antarctic environment.
This proof-of-concept study demonstrates that distinct invertebrate species produce unique, taxon-specific acoustic signatures under controlled conditions, establishing the potential for non-destructive, scalable soil biodiversity monitoring through automated ecoacoustic classification.
This study demonstrates the first long-term acoustic monitoring of cave-dwelling insectivorous bats in the Republic of Congo by utilizing a novel sonotype classifier to reveal year-round activity patterns and reproductive phenology in a previously data-deficient region.
This study demonstrates that the climate vulnerability of the alpine-obligate Gray crowned Rosy Finch is shaped by a three-timescale co-limitation framework involving static nesting cliffs, dynamic annual snowpack, and directional woody encroachment, which together drive significant population density fluctuations despite stable detection rates.