368 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 reveals that the microbiota of the polyphagous fly *Drosophila suzukii* is primarily shaped by life stage, while its yeast communities are specifically driven by the host fruit, suggesting that both core and niche-specific microbes are horizontally acquired from the environment.
This study of Japanese natural forests reveals that while tree communities are slowly shifting toward warmer-adapted species (thermophilization), the resulting growing mismatch between community composition and ambient temperature (climatic debt) significantly constrains forest primary productivity, highlighting the critical need to monitor community-level thermal responses for sustaining ecosystem functioning under climate change.
Using X-ray reconstruction (XROMM), this study demonstrates that songbirds achieve primate-like dexterity in seed manipulation through the highly coordinated, multi-dimensional movements of the beak and tongue, with specialized mechanics tailored to their specific biting strength.
This study demonstrates that utilizing quantitative Cycle threshold (Ct) values from mosquito pools, rather than binarizing them, significantly improves West Nile virus prevalence estimation and risk assessment by revealing underlying biological dynamics and outperforming traditional methods at high infection rates.
This study demonstrates that increasing both the unpalatability of aposematic models and the absolute density of the prey community significantly reduces predation on imperfect Batesian mimics, highlighting absolute community density as a critical, yet underappreciated, factor in shaping mimicry dynamics.
This study demonstrates that integrating multi-sensor remote sensing data (Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Aerial LiDAR) can effectively upscale key dimensions of terrestrial habitat structure measured by Terrestrial Laser Scanning across diverse island ecosystems, although accurately capturing fine-scale structural complexity remains a significant challenge.
This study demonstrates that incorporating full-season phenological variation into spectral models significantly improves the accuracy of predicting plant functional traits across a growing season, whereas models trained only on peak-season data fail to capture temporal dynamics and produce biologically unrealistic estimates.
This paper introduces a probabilistic-stochastic-deterministic (PSD) modelling framework that unifies the four paradigms of metacommunity theory into a single mathematical description, offering both computational efficiency and analytical power to accurately capture demographic stochasticity and predict dynamics across diverse ecological regimes where traditional models fail.
This study demonstrates that altitude drives niche partitioning between *Dacus bivittatus* and *Dacus punctatifrons* in Tanzania's Uluguru Mountains, where *D. punctatifrons* dominates warmer lowlands while *D. bivittatus* prevails at higher elevations with distinct seasonal patterns, offering critical insights for climate-sensitive pest management.
A five-year pond experiment demonstrates that the invasion of red swamp crayfish triggers an abrupt, largely irreversible regime shift from a clear-water to a turbid state, fundamentally altering ecosystem metabolism and biophysical processes.