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.
Field-based microcosm experiments at Shiraho Reef demonstrate that combined nitrogen and phosphorus enrichment drives short-term shifts from picophytoplankton dominance to larger phytoplankton groups, highlighting the critical role of pelagic processes in coral reef carbon dynamics under nutrient stress.
This study demonstrates that on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, moderate populations of plateau pikas facilitate livestock by selectively removing poisonous plants to improve forage quality and yak weight gain, revealing a density-dependent shift from competition to mutualism between small and large herbivores.
This study utilizes autonomous cameras and AI to demonstrate that high population density in Antarctic fur seal colonies effectively limits predator access and reduces predation risk for pups through spatial exclusion, while scavenger overlap remains unaffected by density differences.
This paper introduces "Synchrony Genetics," a framework that reinterprets genetic structure as an emergent indicator of ecological coupling mechanisms—such as environmental correlation, dispersal, and species interactions—rather than a static equilibrium property, thereby enabling the inference of spatial population dynamics from genetic data in systems where demographic independence is violated.
By combining spatially-explicit modeling with laboratory experiments on *Paramecium* and bacterial parasites, this study demonstrates that within-host interactions altering host susceptibility have the most significant impact on parasite spatial epidemiology, particularly by amplifying spatial priority effects during sequential invasions.
This study reveals that during a heatwave at Heron Island, the survival of *Stylophora pistillata* corals is driven primarily by intrinsic biological differences among cryptic taxa and individual colonies rather than environmental exposure, with some locally common corals from historically warmer habitats surprisingly proving more susceptible to bleaching.
This study reveals that climate-driven variations in maize-associated fungal communities and their predicted mycotoxin potential differ significantly across Keshan and Kashin-Beck disease endemic regions in China, suggesting that foodborne fungal exposomes, rather than selenium deficiency alone, may contribute to the geographic heterogeneity of these diseases.
An eight-year study in the Brazilian Cerrado demonstrates that sustained, monitored non-lethal removals of white-lipped peccaries effectively reduce both their population size and associated corn crop damage, offering a viable strategy for wildlife-agriculture coexistence in tropical landscapes.
This study introduces "PondSentry," a data-driven anomaly detection system utilizing tensor decomposition of next-generation sequencing time-series data to predict open raceway pond crashes up to three days in advance, thereby enabling timely interventions to improve the sustainability and productivity of industrial algal biomass cultivation.
This study pioneers the application of quantitative stable isotope probing (qSIP) coupled with 18S rRNA sequencing to identify a diverse array of active protist grazers, including rare and abundant taxa across various trophic strategies, that assimilate prey biomass in natural freshwater communities.