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.
By integrating machine learning and Bayesian modeling on over 41,000 plant observations, this study demonstrates that combining environmental conditions with a host's prior infection history significantly improves the prediction of disease risk and reveals that pathogen-pathogen interactions can be as critical as abiotic factors in driving seasonal epidemics.
Through a structured decision-making process involving a population model, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and US Fish and Wildlife Service identified a sustainable recovery strategy for the endangered Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit that prioritizes expanding conservation breeding, continuing annual RHDV2 vaccinations, and targeting translocations to establishing recovery areas while also emphasizing habitat protection and improved monitoring.
This study reveals that soil rewetting and phosphorus amendment drive divergent successional patterns in viral communities, where wet-up triggers a shift from persistent virions to active infections while phosphorus specifically enhances infection dynamics and host-virus coupling among transcriptionally active viruses.
By integrating seafloor imagery, bathymetry, and oceanographic modeling, this study identifies steep geomorphological features in the Weddell Sea's Powell Basin as critical biodiversity hotspots that concentrate vast benthic populations through specific interactions with cold bottom waters and ocean circulation, providing a scalable framework for conservation in a warming Antarctic environment.
This proof-of-concept study demonstrates that distinct invertebrate species produce unique, taxon-specific acoustic signatures under controlled conditions, establishing the potential for non-destructive, scalable soil biodiversity monitoring through automated ecoacoustic classification.
This study demonstrates the first long-term acoustic monitoring of cave-dwelling insectivorous bats in the Republic of Congo by utilizing a novel sonotype classifier to reveal year-round activity patterns and reproductive phenology in a previously data-deficient region.
This study demonstrates that the climate vulnerability of the alpine-obligate Gray crowned Rosy Finch is shaped by a three-timescale co-limitation framework involving static nesting cliffs, dynamic annual snowpack, and directional woody encroachment, which together drive significant population density fluctuations despite stable detection rates.
WildAlert is a scalable, AI-driven early warning system that integrates natural language processing and anomaly detection on real-time wildlife rehabilitation data to proactively identify diverse ecological and health threats, such as zoonotic diseases and environmental hazards, often before they are confirmed by traditional surveillance methods.
A seven-year study on the Tibetan Plateau demonstrates that nitrogen fertilization-induced soil acidification exerts a stronger negative impact on alpine grassland bacterial diversity than plant species loss, primarily by suppressing oligotrophic taxa and stimulating copiotrophic ones.
This study demonstrates that the spatial breeding dispersion of northern lapwings is not driven by passive habitat filtering but is a highly plastic, context-dependent strategy where individuals dynamically switch between aggregation for communal defense and dispersion to avoid competition or detection, a flexibility modulated by predation risk and climate-induced habitat bottlenecks that critically influences population persistence.