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.
By employing BONCAT-FACS-Seq to analyze the active subset of soil microbes, this study demonstrates that nitrous oxide production is driven not by a single dominant species but by shifting ensembles of active organisms, suggesting that framing denitrification as a community trait could significantly improve the predictability of this greenhouse gas emission.
This study demonstrates that restoring tropical dry evergreen forests in southern India with native species can achieve carbon sequestration levels comparable to non-native trees while maintaining high biodiversity, proving that ecological integrity and climate mitigation goals can be successfully balanced.
Although southern elephant seals exhibit substantial at-sea overlap that theoretically enables inter-colony transmission of HPAI H5N1, the study concludes that seal-to-seal spread between breeding colonies is unlikely, despite the potential for the virus to reach Macquarie Island via other pathways.
This study develops and applies a reproducible analytical framework using camera-trap data to demonstrate that mass mortality events create extended windows of scavenger-carcass activity compared to single carcasses, thereby increasing the potential for pathogen transmission.
Symbiotic yeasts associated with the Eurasian spruce bark beetle facilitate host colonization and protect beetle offspring by transforming the tree's defensive stilbene glycosides into antimicrobial compounds that inhibit pathogenic fungi.
This study reveals that the Rivulidae fish family suffers from significant Linnean, Wallacean, and conservation shortfalls, characterized by numerous undescribed species, inadequate spatial sampling, and a critical lag in conservation assessments, necessitating immediate protective action despite existing knowledge gaps.
This paper proposes a network-mediated diffusion model that explains the emergence of disordered vegetation patterns in arid regions as a result of the interplay between local and global water transport scales on small-world network topologies, predicting distinct pattern types with varying resilience to environmental pressure.
An analysis of over 38,000 nesting attempts reveals that complete brood failure in sympatric great and blue tits is frequent and primarily driven by species-specific responses to local density, habitat structure, and temporal scales, while avian malaria infection status plays no significant role.
This study demonstrates that guano from anthropic little brown bat maternity colonies serves as a valuable non-invasive source for monitoring diet, pathogens, and microbial communities, revealing that roost environment significantly influences the trajectory of guano microbiome succession and the persistence of white-nose syndrome over a 12-week decomposition period.
This paper presents a mathematical model coupling mosquito and human epidemiological dynamics to demonstrate that the Toxic Male Technique (TMT) is more effective than the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) in reducing arbovirus transmission risk in the Emilia-Romagna region.