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 introduces an efficient, interpretable hyperbolic equation with independent parameters to model environmental threshold effects, which was successfully applied to analyze how soil water deficit and summer temperature constraints impact the growth of 18 European forest tree species.
Using a spatially explicit framework applied to Switzerland, this study demonstrates that trade-off-based siting strategies for renewable energy can effectively balance energy production with biodiversity conservation, significantly reducing ecological impacts compared to purely efficiency-driven approaches.
This study demonstrates that hyperspectral remote sensing can effectively distinguish the harmful diatom *Pseudo-nitzschia* from other benign diatom genera in the Northeast Pacific by identifying a unique spectral fingerprint around 560 nm, offering a scalable alternative to traditional in situ sampling for harmful algal bloom detection.
This study proposes an ecosystem-based approach using production-to-biomass (P/B) ratios to establish protective harvest limits for native "rough" fishes, demonstrating that many long-lived nongame species have turnover rates similar to popular game fish and therefore require similarly conservative management to ensure sustainability.
This paper presents a reproducible methodological roadmap with standardized metrics and case studies to integrate extreme heat dynamics into ecological research, demonstrating how accounting for heat extremes—rather than just mean temperatures—improves predictions of species distributions, physiological stress, and population viability.
This study reveals that while urbanization generally drives a decline in avian biodiversity and a shift toward generalist dietary traits, the presence of diverse vegetation and canopy cover can buffer these losses and facilitate active prey selection, ultimately sustaining insectivorous bird communities and their ecological functions in cities.
Using a spatially explicit model for European lobster, this study demonstrates that while no-take zones generally increase abundance and size, their effectiveness in linear coastal systems with asymmetric larval dispersal critically depends on placement, with downstream reserves outperforming upstream ones due to the combined benefits of larval import and local retention.
Using a Bayesian Jolly-Seber mark-resight model, this study estimates that the 2025 Red Knot stopover population at Delaware Bay reached approximately 54,000 individuals with stable migration timing, providing critical data to support the Adaptive Resource Management framework for balancing horseshoe crab harvest and shorebird conservation.
Although managed bumble bees (Bombus impatiens) forage on strawberry flowers, their visitation rates are too low to alleviate pollen limitation, and their foraging is heavily influenced by surrounding landscape composition, often leading them to alternative floral resources in diverse agricultural settings where adding colonies may not be economically beneficial.
This study utilizes photogrammetry to quantify the morphological development of wild stony corals across six metrics, revealing that while massive and non-massive colonies follow distinct growth trajectories, traditional categorical growth forms often obscure significant early-life developmental variation.