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.
WildAlert is a scalable, AI-driven early warning system that integrates natural language processing and anomaly detection on real-time wildlife rehabilitation data to proactively identify diverse ecological and health threats, such as zoonotic diseases and environmental hazards, often before they are confirmed by traditional surveillance methods.
A seven-year study on the Tibetan Plateau demonstrates that nitrogen fertilization-induced soil acidification exerts a stronger negative impact on alpine grassland bacterial diversity than plant species loss, primarily by suppressing oligotrophic taxa and stimulating copiotrophic ones.
This study demonstrates that the spatial breeding dispersion of northern lapwings is not driven by passive habitat filtering but is a highly plastic, context-dependent strategy where individuals dynamically switch between aggregation for communal defense and dispersion to avoid competition or detection, a flexibility modulated by predation risk and climate-induced habitat bottlenecks that critically influences population persistence.
By utilizing leaf-derived environmental DNA and the NIClassify tool to overcome taxonomic limitations, this study reveals that arthropod communities on Oahu are primarily structured by spatial location and elevation, with introduced taxa declining at higher elevations, while plant species effects remain context-dependent.
This study demonstrates that high-throughput DNA metabarcoding using the Qiagen Blood and Tissue Kit provides a cost-effective and efficient alternative to traditional morphological methods for assessing leaf-litter invertebrate biodiversity, successfully revealing significant community differences between forest and field habitats driven by temperature.
This study demonstrates that delayed predator responses to environmental shifts can render ecosystems vulnerable to catastrophic collapse even under relatively slow and small-magnitude changes, highlighting the critical need to incorporate predator responsiveness and the rate of environmental change into resilience assessments.
This study demonstrates that macroalgae from southeastern Spain, particularly the invasive species *Rugulopteryx okamurae*, possess significant antioxidant and antifungal activities against *Fusarium oxysporum* TR4, supporting the potential valorization of invasive algal biomass as a source of bioactive compounds.
This paper introduces the Mothbox and Mothbot, an open-source, low-cost automated light trap and machine learning system that enables scalable, high-resolution insect monitoring and biodiversity conservation by making data collection accessible to non-specialists and ensuring quality through human-in-the-loop validation.
This study demonstrates that the performance of the wild legume *Calicotome villosa* is better predicted by the collective functional composition of its nodule microbiome—including non-rhizobial endophytes—than by the primary nitrogen-fixing symbiont alone, supporting a broader view of nodules as multipartite microbial communities.
This study analyzes over 35,000 community science records to reveal that monarch butterflies utilize more than 70 milkweed species with distinct seasonal shifts in host preference, while demonstrating that non-native horticultural milkweeds have expanded the species' winter breeding range by over 60%.