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.
Contrary to the expectation that plant presence would enhance decomposition through exudates, this study demonstrates that winter wheat actually slows decomposition rates due to resource competition with soil microbes, a process driven more by fungal activity and soil humidity than by bacteria or temperature.
By employing an efficient sequential sampling algorithm to apply a niche-neutral model to bird occurrence patterns in the Riau archipelago, the study demonstrates that while the model's baseline assumptions fail to explain observed segregation and nestedness, incorporating inter-island heterogeneity in niche diversity and immigration rates successfully diagnoses the underlying mechanisms structuring these communities.
This study demonstrates that increasing spatial approximation complexity in distribution models does not necessarily improve prediction quality and can actually degrade predictive performance by producing poorly calibrated uncertainty estimates, thereby highlighting the need for practitioners to carefully select appropriate mesh resolution rather than assuming higher complexity always yields better results.
By analyzing Chinese anurans, this study demonstrates that relying solely on adult traits to assess extinction risk is insufficient, as larval stage characteristics also significantly influence vulnerability, necessitating a whole-life-history perspective for effective conservation.
This study analyzes 11 years of California steelhead angler data to reveal that the fishery exhibits extreme catch inequality (Gini coefficient of 0.81) driven largely by zero-catch anglers, while also establishing a methodological framework for determining the minimum sample sizes needed for robust inequality estimation in recreational fisheries management.
The paper introduces NeMO, a flexible R package that utilizes Bayesian multi-species occupancy models to address detection uncertainty in eDNA metabarcoding by accounting for nested sampling structures, estimating key detection parameters, and optimizing survey design for effective biodiversity monitoring.
This global synthesis of over 30,000 species reveals that while most organisms avoid urban environments, the relationship between body size and urban affinity is highly heterogeneous across taxa, with larger plants generally thriving in cities while animals show variable responses, underscoring the need for tailored strategies to support urban biodiversity.
MetaBeeAI is an open-source, modular pipeline that integrates large language models with expert-in-the-loop validation to enable transparent, reproducible, and scalable extraction of structured evidence from complex biological literature.
This study refutes the hypothesis that increased precipitation causes declining methane uptake in forest soils through diffusion limitation, as 27 years of data from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study and 14 years from Hubbard Brook show precipitation explains negligible variance in flux, pointing instead to chronic biological degradation driven by nitrogen inhibition and invasive earthworm activity.
By analyzing a massive HPAI outbreak in a threatened Dalmatian pelican population, this study reveals that the 2022 panzootic was driven by a single introduction and exhibits higher transmissibility and shedding duration than previous subtypes, while demonstrating that current control measures like carcass removal and manual vaccination are largely ineffective for wildlife management.