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.
By combining spatially-explicit modeling with laboratory experiments on *Paramecium* and bacterial parasites, this study demonstrates that within-host interactions altering host susceptibility have the most significant impact on parasite spatial epidemiology, particularly by amplifying spatial priority effects during sequential invasions.
This study reveals that during a heatwave at Heron Island, the survival of *Stylophora pistillata* corals is driven primarily by intrinsic biological differences among cryptic taxa and individual colonies rather than environmental exposure, with some locally common corals from historically warmer habitats surprisingly proving more susceptible to bleaching.
This study reveals that climate-driven variations in maize-associated fungal communities and their predicted mycotoxin potential differ significantly across Keshan and Kashin-Beck disease endemic regions in China, suggesting that foodborne fungal exposomes, rather than selenium deficiency alone, may contribute to the geographic heterogeneity of these diseases.
An eight-year study in the Brazilian Cerrado demonstrates that sustained, monitored non-lethal removals of white-lipped peccaries effectively reduce both their population size and associated corn crop damage, offering a viable strategy for wildlife-agriculture coexistence in tropical landscapes.
This study introduces "PondSentry," a data-driven anomaly detection system utilizing tensor decomposition of next-generation sequencing time-series data to predict open raceway pond crashes up to three days in advance, thereby enabling timely interventions to improve the sustainability and productivity of industrial algal biomass cultivation.
This study pioneers the application of quantitative stable isotope probing (qSIP) coupled with 18S rRNA sequencing to identify a diverse array of active protist grazers, including rare and abundant taxa across various trophic strategies, that assimilate prey biomass in natural freshwater communities.
This study demonstrates that temperature conditions experienced during the autumn and winter pupal and egg stages of the winter moth induce carryover effects on spring phenology, which are only partially compensated for and decrease under warming conditions, highlighting the necessity of accounting for multi-stage thermal impacts to accurately predict phenological shifts and species interactions.
This paper introduces a novel analytical framework based on branching process theory and recursive probability generating functions to calculate the joint distributions of kin numbers structured by both age and various life stages, such as parity, health, or location, thereby addressing a key challenge in kinship demography.
This paper clarifies the often-confusing landscape of camera trap density estimation methods for unmarked animals by developing a mathematical framework that maps the relationships between various estimators under specific simplifying assumptions, thereby providing a clearer conceptual foundation for researchers to select and implement appropriate monitoring strategies.
This paper proposes a flexible workflow, implemented in the `movedesign` R Shiny application, to optimize animal tracking study designs by balancing sampling duration, frequency, and population size against logistical constraints to ensure robust, unbiased population-level inferences for movement and space use.