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.
This study presents the first cradle-to-farm-gate Life Cycle Assessment of broiler chicken production in India's North Eastern Himalayan region, revealing that feed production (particularly maize) is the primary environmental hotspot and establishing a global warming potential of 3.77 kg CO2-eq per kilogram of live weight.
An integrated risk assessment and species distribution modeling study reveals that 15 non-native fish species, particularly tilapias, pose a high invasion risk to the Shadegan International Wetland and lower Tigris Basin, with climate change potentially expanding their suitable habitats and underscoring the urgent need for coordinated transboundary management.
This study utilizes the TPS-ISK screening tool to assess 34 non-native urban tree species in continental Europe, revealing that while nearly 30% currently pose a high invasion risk, climate change projections significantly elevate these threats, necessitating urgent proactive management and monitoring strategies.
This study analyzes over 34,000 images of 10,400 ant species worldwide to demonstrate that their coloration is driven by multiple independent environmental factors—such as UV radiation, precipitation, and temperature—rather than a single macroecological rule like Gloger's rule.
This study of a 143-year grassland restoration chronosequence reveals that while plant diversity recovers rapidly, soil microbial communities undergo a taxonomic contraction accompanied by a functional expansion in carbon cycling and stress tolerance, indicating that passive regeneration alone is insufficient for full ecosystem recovery due to persistent soil legacy effects.
This study resolves the paradox of sub-linear symbiotic scaling by demonstrating that specialist symbionts, which drive global biodiversity accumulation and face the highest coextinction risks, fundamentally constrain ecological network architecture and likely constitute the majority of threatened species on Earth.
This study establishes the first consolidated marine biosecurity baseline for the ROPME Sea Area by systematically validating 192 species, correcting previous inconsistencies, and identifying 39 extant species as very high risk to enable coordinated transboundary management of biological invasions.
This paper explores the application of neural network tools, specifically LSTMs, CNNs, and Reinforcement Learning, to address key fisheries science challenges in forecasting, spatial standardization, and policy optimization, while acknowledging their tradeoffs and outlining future research directions.
Using an individual-based simulation model, this study demonstrates that disturbance levels and habitat amount, rather than fragmentation alone, are the primary drivers shaping community-weighted dispersal strategies in both continuous and fragmented landscapes.
This study demonstrates that in Nares Strait, functional diversity of benthic macrofauna is a superior predictor of organic matter remineralization rates than taxonomic diversity, suggesting that ongoing sea ice decline could shift community composition toward deposit feeders, thereby accelerating remineralization and potentially reducing the Arctic's capacity as a carbon sink.