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.
This study develops and applies a reproducible analytical framework using camera-trap data to demonstrate that mass mortality events create extended windows of scavenger-carcass activity compared to single carcasses, thereby increasing the potential for pathogen transmission.
Symbiotic yeasts associated with the Eurasian spruce bark beetle facilitate host colonization and protect beetle offspring by transforming the tree's defensive stilbene glycosides into antimicrobial compounds that inhibit pathogenic fungi.
This study reveals that the Rivulidae fish family suffers from significant Linnean, Wallacean, and conservation shortfalls, characterized by numerous undescribed species, inadequate spatial sampling, and a critical lag in conservation assessments, necessitating immediate protective action despite existing knowledge gaps.
This paper proposes a network-mediated diffusion model that explains the emergence of disordered vegetation patterns in arid regions as a result of the interplay between local and global water transport scales on small-world network topologies, predicting distinct pattern types with varying resilience to environmental pressure.
An analysis of over 38,000 nesting attempts reveals that complete brood failure in sympatric great and blue tits is frequent and primarily driven by species-specific responses to local density, habitat structure, and temporal scales, while avian malaria infection status plays no significant role.
This study demonstrates that guano from anthropic little brown bat maternity colonies serves as a valuable non-invasive source for monitoring diet, pathogens, and microbial communities, revealing that roost environment significantly influences the trajectory of guano microbiome succession and the persistence of white-nose syndrome over a 12-week decomposition period.
This paper presents a mathematical model coupling mosquito and human epidemiological dynamics to demonstrate that the Toxic Male Technique (TMT) is more effective than the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) in reducing arbovirus transmission risk in the Emilia-Romagna region.
This study demonstrates that applying temperature corrections to environmental DNA (eDNA) data based on field-derived estimates compromises the ability to infer fish abundance in seasonal systems, as these corrections inadvertently remove the abundance signal along with the temperature effect, whereas corrections based on laboratory metabolic rates or uncorrected data remain reliable predictors.
This study demonstrates that while full-length COI barcodes improve the detection of sequencing artifacts like NUMTs and chimeras, the standard ~658 bp mini-barcode remains the optimal marker for soil animal eDNA metabarcoding by effectively balancing target recovery, taxonomic assignment confidence, and ecological interpretability.
This study demonstrates that while standardized light traps are effective for monitoring Baltic Sea sticklebacks and filling a winter monitoring gap for littoral mysids, accurate mysid sampling requires mandatory predator exclusion and must account for the method's low statistical power for detecting gradual population changes due to strong seasonal and spatial aggregation effects.