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.
WildObserve is a desktop application that streamlines camera-trap image analysis by enabling researchers to iteratively train a custom species classification model through simple annotation on an ordinary laptop, eliminating the need for coding expertise, GPUs, or remote servers while maintaining data privacy.
The paper introduces StatClim, a Bayesian hierarchical model that automatically identifies the most informative climatic windows and aggregation methods from time-series data to improve the prediction of biological responses, as demonstrated by its successful application to *Fagus sylvatica* mast seeding.
This study comparing two tropical forest sites reveals that while higher fruit availability supports greater local abundance of avian frugivores, it does not necessarily lead to increased visitation rates on individual trees, suggesting that resource dilution and foraging distribution play key roles in structuring plant-frugivore interactions.
This study reveals that host life-history strategies, particularly longevity and cumulative environmental exposure, significantly shape viral diversity in freshwater galaxiids, as the river-resident *Galaxias gollumoides* harbored a far richer virome than its amphidromous counterpart *Galaxias maculatus*, challenging the assumption that migration drives higher viral transmission.
This study demonstrates that in riparian buffers, the specific identity of plant species influences streambank erosion primarily by altering soil moisture levels rather than through root trait diversity or species interactions, suggesting that erosion control strategies should prioritize species selection based on their hydrological impacts.
By integrating tree-ring data, triple stable isotopes, eddy covariance observations, and process-based modeling in a mature beech forest, this study reveals that long-term increases in intrinsic water-use efficiency are driven by enhanced photosynthesis rather than stomatal closure, while highlighting that discrepancies between leaf- and ecosystem-scale efficiency metrics arise primarily from the model's failure to account for diverse vegetation and hydrological processes.
This study utilizes spatiotemporal overlap of indirect activity signs to map potential encounter risks between humans and dangerous large mammals in southern Tanzania, demonstrating that proactive, targeted interventions based on these hazard maps are more effective for preventing human-wildlife conflict than reactive responses to actual incidents.
This paper outlines the objectives, design, and synthetic data generation methods of the first-ever avian influenza modelling challenge, which utilized a simulated landscape of 9,160 poultry farms to engage 45 global teams in forecasting, analyzing transmission drivers, and evaluating control strategies for highly pathogenic avian influenza epidemics.
This study demonstrates that for elk, social familiarity among group members is a stronger driver of risky habitat selection than genetic relatedness or mere proximity, as shared social information allows them to offset predation risks and access otherwise dangerous but profitable resources.
This study demonstrates that straightened river channels with high surrounding building heights serve as crucial movement corridors for Black-headed Gulls in urban Tokyo, challenging the notion that such modified waterways lack ecological value for waterbird conservation.