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 demonstrates that high-throughput DNA metabarcoding using the Qiagen Blood and Tissue Kit provides a cost-effective and efficient alternative to traditional morphological methods for assessing leaf-litter invertebrate biodiversity, successfully revealing significant community differences between forest and field habitats driven by temperature.
This study demonstrates that delayed predator responses to environmental shifts can render ecosystems vulnerable to catastrophic collapse even under relatively slow and small-magnitude changes, highlighting the critical need to incorporate predator responsiveness and the rate of environmental change into resilience assessments.
This study demonstrates that macroalgae from southeastern Spain, particularly the invasive species *Rugulopteryx okamurae*, possess significant antioxidant and antifungal activities against *Fusarium oxysporum* TR4, supporting the potential valorization of invasive algal biomass as a source of bioactive compounds.
This paper introduces the Mothbox and Mothbot, an open-source, low-cost automated light trap and machine learning system that enables scalable, high-resolution insect monitoring and biodiversity conservation by making data collection accessible to non-specialists and ensuring quality through human-in-the-loop validation.
This study demonstrates that the performance of the wild legume *Calicotome villosa* is better predicted by the collective functional composition of its nodule microbiome—including non-rhizobial endophytes—than by the primary nitrogen-fixing symbiont alone, supporting a broader view of nodules as multipartite microbial communities.
This study analyzes over 35,000 community science records to reveal that monarch butterflies utilize more than 70 milkweed species with distinct seasonal shifts in host preference, while demonstrating that non-native horticultural milkweeds have expanded the species' winter breeding range by over 60%.
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.