🌿 Category

ecology

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.

🌿 ecology

Autumn drought drives deterministic bacterial filtering and network destabilization in a phenotype-related manner in Pinus halepensis seedlings

This study demonstrates that short, severe autumn droughts at moderate temperatures trigger phenotype-dependent deterministic filtering of bacterial communities and destabilize root microbiome networks in *Pinus halepensis* seedlings, ultimately compromising their recovery capacity and hindering Mediterranean forest restoration efforts under climate change.

Aleksieienko, I., Reiter, I. M., Reilhan, J., De Castro, M., Santaella, C.2026-05-13
🌿 ecology

Optimal Strategies for Signal Sending and Perception in Volatile-mediated Within-Plant Signaling against Herbivory

This study employs a mathematical model to demonstrate that optimal within-plant volatile-mediated signaling against herbivory, involving the co-evolution of signal emission and perception, is favored only under intermediate herbivory pressure, while the inclusion of perception-independent functions can decouple these traits and enable emission-only strategies.

Kudo, S. N., Iwakura, K., Satake, A.2026-05-11
🌿 ecology

Future-proofing agrobiodiversity: climate and niche-aware conservation planning using reinforcement learning.

This study proposes a novel, climate-aware conservation planning framework using reinforcement learning to optimize the protection of European crop wild relatives, demonstrating that accounting for niche coverage and range shifts significantly improves conservation outcomes compared to traditional methods.

Butikofer, L., Silvestro, D., Rubio Teso, L., Molina, A., Lara Romero, C., Garcia Valdes, R., Broenniman, O., Iriondo, J (…)2026-05-07
🌿 ecology

Mapping California's Urban Forest at Scale: An Error-Adjusted Canopy Time Series for Monitoring Change

This study presents a scalable, error-adjusted deep learning framework for monitoring California's urban tree canopy, revealing a statistically indistinguishable-from-zero statewide decline from 2016 to 2022 and highlighting that over half of urban canopy resides on private residential land, which underscores the necessity of rigorous uncertainty estimation for accurate policy tracking.

Pawlak, C. C., Yost, J. M., Ventura, J., Guizan, G., Arnold, S., Okin, G. S., Cavanuagh, K. C., Fricker, G. A., Ritter (…)2026-05-07
🌿 ecology

A prioritization strategy for protecting Conservation Imperatives Sites

This paper presents a prioritization framework that identifies 1,667 critical unprotected sites (Conservation Imperatives) across 20 countries, which, despite covering only 0.37% of Earth's terrestrial surface, offer high irreplaceability and connectivity to existing protected areas to effectively prevent species extinctions and support the global 30x30 conservation target.

Gosling, J., Dinerstein, E., Joshi, A. R., Burgess, N. D., Mellin, H., Joppa, L., Bingham, H. C., McDermott-Long, O., Up (…)2026-05-05
🌿 ecology

Semi-Annual Cycles in the Biotic Communities of Temperate Aquatic Habitats

By applying machine learning to DNA metabarcoding time series, this study reveals a globally consistent, semi-annual cycle in temperate aquatic biotic communities driven by insolation patterns and centered on photoautotrophs, offering a new framework for anticipating ecological events like phytoplankton blooms.

Sperlea, T., Glackin, C. C., Vogel, L., Zschaubitz, E., Nietz, C., Karsten, S., Dippner, J. W., Elferink, S., Loose, C. (…)2026-05-05
🌿 ecology

Rodent-driven NO3--N enrichment reshapes amoeba--bacteria co-occurrence and bacterial functional potential in burrow soils

This study reveals that rodent activity enriches burrow soils with nitrate, which restructures amoeba-bacteria interactions to favor pathogenic bacterial taxa and enhance infectious disease-related functional potential, thereby linking rodent-driven soil heterogeneity to zoonotic pathogen emergence.

Zhang, C., Sebbane, F., Zhang, C., Whittington, J. D., Zhao, Y., Chaolemen,, Yang, R., Xu, L.2026-05-04
🌿 ecology

Seed Microbiota Diversity and Culture Collection of Four Major Crops Covering Different Genotypes and Production Modes

This study characterizes the diverse and variable seed microbiota of four major crops across different genotypes and production modes, revealing distinct ecological drivers for bacteria and fungi while establishing a comprehensive culture collection that highlights the complementary value of combining culturomics and sequencing for discovering potential bioinoculants.

Simonin, M., Guschinskaya, N., Marchi, M., MARAIS, C., Preveaux, A., Briand, M., Kavunu, N., Bosc-Bierne, A., Labourgade (…)2026-05-01
🌿 ecology

Stopover departure decisions and movement patterns of migratory bats during autumn migration

This study of Nathusius pipistrelles in the Netherlands reveals that autumn migration stopover departure decisions and diverse movement patterns are driven by a complex interaction between intrinsic factors like reproductive status and environmental conditions such as wind and weather, highlighting the need to account for this behavioral variability in conservation planning.

Lagerveld, S., Karagicheva, J., Vries, P. d., Rakhimberdiev, E., Stienstra, K., Noort, B. C. A., Poot, M. J. M., Karwink (…)2026-05-01