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 demonstrates that in the widespread grass *Phragmites australis*, nutrient resorption efficiency is genetically canalized by phylogeographic lineage and geographic origin rather than being plastically adjusted in response to severe salt stress, implying that global change predictions for nutrient cycling must account for the evolutionary history of plant populations.
This study demonstrates that rare plants in gypsum-rich steppes make a significant contribution to local biodiversity conservation, as their rarity and ecological specialization do not necessarily correlate with lower arthropod diversity or interaction singularity compared to widespread species.
This study demonstrates that adding human acoustic cues and pet (dog) visual or acoustic cues to human visual presence significantly increases the fear responses (alert and flight distances) of wild sika deer in northern Japan, suggesting that managing human and pet behaviors through guidance and zoning is more effective than blanket restrictions for conserving wildlife.
The paper introduces AIedes, a neural network framework that accurately predicts the presence and weekly abundance of the invasive *Aedes albopictus* mosquito across Europe using only climate variables, supported by newly harmonized surveillance and climate datasets released for reproducible evaluation.
This paper establishes a mechanistic framework that transforms the widely measurable species-area relationship into a predictive tool for quantifying biodiversity tail risks, such as local collapse probabilities, by deriving exact statistical identities from Fisher's log-series and validating them with global forest census data.
Recreational climbing alters cliff soil chemistry by increasing pH through chalk deposition, which subsequently reshapes fungal communities and negatively impacts plant-associated symbiotic relationships, potentially threatening the resilience of these specialized ecosystems.
This paper proposes that global epistasis in microbial ecosystems—where the effect of adding a species depends linearly on the community's background function—arises generically from shared resource constraints, serving as a null expectation for competitive systems while being disrupted by facilitation and niche partitioning.
This paper presents the AvianMetaNetwork, a comprehensive, open dataset documenting 25,907 empirically verified, directional interspecific interactions among 1,989 bird species across the continental United States and Canada, designed to fill critical knowledge gaps and enable macroecological and eco-evolutionary research at continental scales.
This study models the persistence of management effects in *Calluna vulgaris* communities on deep peat, revealing that a 50-year transition period to a natural age structure is required after banning rotational burning, thereby highlighting the urgent need for alternative strategies like rewetting to mitigate wildfire risks and avoid biased ecological assessments.
This paper introduces a novel explainable machine learning consensus framework that quantifies explanation consistency across multiple model architectures to reliably identify robust environmental drivers and flag areas of uncertainty in ecological population dynamics, demonstrated through synthetic coral cover data.