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 paper demonstrates that while dispersal limitation can weaken Janzen-Connell effects, the synergistic interaction between Janzen-Connell effects and habitat partitioning in spatially autocorrelated environments significantly enhances species coexistence, a dynamic quantified by a novel spatial JC-HP covariance metric.
This study demonstrates that widespread internal methanogenesis by heartwood microbes, rather than soil transport, is the primary driver of methane emissions in upland forests, with net flux determined by the species-specific balance between microbial production and consumption.
This study reveals that while the algal symbionts of *Siderastrea siderea* corals in urban Miami remain stable, their bacterial communities exhibit significant seasonal and spatial plasticity, shifting in composition and function to enhance stress tolerance and nutrient acquisition in polluted environments.
Based on a pan-European analysis of over 2,900 trees across sixteen species, this study reveals that tree-level drought resilience is inherently difficult to predict using local attributes like size or competition, as responses are primarily driven by species-specific traits and topographic variation rather than stand-level factors.
This study demonstrates that in a 16-species synthetic microbial community, total carbon availability is a more critical driver of compositional dynamics and tristable state transitions than resource complexity, with competitive success shifting from being determined by lag phase duration at low carbon levels to maximum growth rate at high levels.
Through long-term field experiments in mature oak forests, this study demonstrates that while both drought and elevated CO2 slow litter decomposition, drought exerts a stronger influence by altering the decomposition environment, whereas elevated CO2 primarily affects decomposability through changes in initial litter properties.
This study quantifies B-vitamin dynamics and their relationship with microbial communities across the Neuse River Estuary, revealing that elevated mid-estuary vitamin concentrations and significant short-term variability are key drivers of plankton composition, thereby highlighting the complex role of these micronutrients in estuarine biogeochemistry.
This study presents a radiometric model to calculate the reliable detection range of cetaceans using infrared imaging systems across various environmental conditions, enabling performance evaluation without the need for extensive at-sea data collection.
This study utilizes survey data and geostatistical modeling to map the spatial risks of contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, foot-and-mouth disease, and lumpy skin disease in Ethiopia, revealing distinct associations with bioclimatic variables and providing reliable risk maps to support climate-informed disease early warning systems.
This study validates the effectiveness of climate reanalysis products in reconstructing air temperature patterns and detecting heatwaves on Atlantic Patagonian rocky shores, demonstrating their utility in complementing local data to investigate ecological impacts like mussel mass mortalities while suggesting that heatwaves alone may not fully explain these losses.