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 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.
A laboratory column study on Metehara Sugar Estate's saline-sodic Cambisols determined that applying phosphogypsum at 100% or higher of the gypsum requirement combined with 3–4 pore volumes of leaching water is the most effective strategy for reducing soil salinity and sodicity to levels suitable for crop production, though field validation is recommended before finalizing implementation guidelines.
BatSpot is a retrainable convolutional neural network with a user-friendly interface that outperforms existing tools in automatically detecting and classifying bat echolocation search calls, buzzes, and social calls, while enabling researchers to easily adapt the model to specific geographic regions for improved conservation monitoring.
This study demonstrates that windthrow-generated tip-up mounds create drier, well-aerated soil conditions that selectively favor black cherry seedling survival over red oak, offering critical regeneration niches for specific tree species in Carolinian forests increasingly constrained by white-tailed deer browsing on the forest floor.
This study demonstrates that internal climate variability can produce qualitatively different and even reversed species distribution outcomes across marine and terrestrial ecosystems, necessitating flexible, stress-tested decision-making strategies that account for multiple plausible climate futures rather than relying on single best-estimate projections.