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.
This paper introduces PEATREST, a novel life cycle assessment model that predicts carbon fluxes and calculates the specific mitigation timescales required for restored afforested peatlands to outperform retained forestry in carbon sequestration and storage.
Using in situ digital holography, this study reveals that salt-wedge dynamics at the Mississippi River plume-shelf interface in the northern Gulf of Mexico drive the formation of thin phytoplankton layers dominated by chain-forming diatoms, while zooplankton remain broadly distributed and weakly coupled to these physical structures.
This study demonstrates that while Maximum Sustainable Yield reference points derived from the hockey-stick stock-recruitment model tend to be biased, their integration with adaptive learning and precautionary measures enables robust fisheries management with comparable yields to those achieved using the true underlying model, even under conditions of structural uncertainty and limited data.
Based on a 40-year Landsat analysis of western U.S. rangelands, this study reveals that mesic resource productivity has decoupled from drought severity since 2005 due to the combined buffering effects of CO2 fertilization and anthropogenic water management, though these systems remain vulnerable to groundwater depletion and ecological shifts.
This study reveals that current IUCN Red List guidelines systematically underestimate climate-related extinction risks for range-shifting species due to a flawed linear assumption regarding habitat loss, prompting recommendations for updated assessment methods.
This study utilizes high-resolution satellite imagery from 1997 to 2021 to map land-cover dynamics in Kyrgyzstan's Tien Shan mountains, revealing that intermediate elevations and high grazing intensities are the primary drivers of habitat transitions, thereby providing a critical framework for distinguishing climate impacts from land-use changes to inform localized management in data-poor regions.
This study demonstrates that while iNaturalist photographs can effectively recover discrete color morph frequencies in *Plethodon* salamanders, they are unsuitable for continuous quantitative phenotyping like dorsal brightness due to overwhelming observer-induced noise that obscures geographic signals.
This study reveals that crickets detect and avoid insectivorous bats through olfaction by sensing the volatile compound (-)-limonene in bat body odor, thereby uncovering a previously unknown olfactory dimension to the classic acoustic predator-prey arms race.
This study demonstrates that while the seagrass *Halophila ovalis* drives directional bacterial succession in meadow sediments, its specific microbiomes are primarily shaped by host selection rather than succession, revealing an uncoupling between these ecological processes for different microbial guilds.
This paper presents a complete mathematical analysis of a plant-pollinator model that unifies extinction thresholds and invasibility under a single reward threshold, revealing how specific network structures like nestedness and connectance mechanistically govern community stability through exact analytical constraints rather than numerical simulations.