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.
This study demonstrates that while iNaturalist photographs can effectively recover discrete color morph frequencies in *Plethodon* salamanders, they are unsuitable for continuous quantitative phenotyping like dorsal brightness due to overwhelming observer-induced noise that obscures geographic signals.
This study reveals that crickets detect and avoid insectivorous bats through olfaction by sensing the volatile compound (-)-limonene in bat body odor, thereby uncovering a previously unknown olfactory dimension to the classic acoustic predator-prey arms race.
This study demonstrates that while the seagrass *Halophila ovalis* drives directional bacterial succession in meadow sediments, its specific microbiomes are primarily shaped by host selection rather than succession, revealing an uncoupling between these ecological processes for different microbial guilds.
This paper presents a complete mathematical analysis of a plant-pollinator model that unifies extinction thresholds and invasibility under a single reward threshold, revealing how specific network structures like nestedness and connectance mechanistically govern community stability through exact analytical constraints rather than numerical simulations.
This study reveals that the vertical velocity of *Microcystis* colonies scales with colony size to the power of 1.13 rather than the square, due to size-dependent increases in shape irregularity that enhance drag, necessitating a correction to Stokes' law to better predict bloom dynamics and chaotic migration trajectories.
This study analyzes spatiotemporal patterns of common dolphin sightings and fishing activity along Portugal's north coast using AIS data and a Generalized Additive Model to identify overlapping areas and environmental predictors, revealing that dolphins frequently inhabit fishing grounds likely due to shared habitat preferences rather than avoidance.
This study utilizes ecological niche modeling to demonstrate that the widespread Mediterranean lizard *Ophisops elegans* has already experienced range contraction since the Last Glacial Maximum and faces severe future habitat loss under climate change scenarios, signaling a significant threat to the region's herpetofauna.
This study reveals that in temperate floodplain forests, phenological stages exert a stronger influence on phyllosphere bacterial community composition than tree species identity or canopy position, while rainwater-mediated throughfall transport significantly shapes spatial microbial heterogeneity and drives seasonal shifts toward more homogeneous, biocontrol-capable communities.
This study presents a novel, non-invasive eDNA-based method that isolates single environmental cells and uses multiplex digital PCR to accurately detect hybrid individuals, thereby overcoming previous resolution limits and offering a critical tool for conservation management against the threat of invasive-native species hybridization.
This study provides the first global, grid-cell-level quantification of how human-mediated plant introductions since the onset of European colonial expansion have reshaped plant functional composition, revealing a worldwide convergence toward assemblages that are generally smaller, more acquisitive, and shorter-lived, albeit with region-specific variations in the magnitude of shifts across size, leaf economics, and life-span axes.