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 study reveals that the Eurasian spruce bark beetle (*Ips typographus*) and related species possess previously undetected mandibular mycetangia in both sexes, which serve as specialized structures for transmitting mutualistic fungi to new host trees.
This study demonstrates that the binary mixture of imidacloprid and epoxiconazole exhibits synergistic toxicity on earthworm life-history traits, particularly reproduction, suggesting that current environmental risk assessments based on single substances may significantly underestimate the ecological risks posed by pesticide mixtures in agricultural soils.
This study demonstrates that process-guided neural networks outperform both standalone process models and data-driven neural networks in predicting forest carbon fluxes, particularly offering superior robustness and generalizability in data-sparse settings and under unseen climatic conditions.
By analyzing over 1,000 datasets across 103 plant species, this study resolves the herbivory paradox by demonstrating that plants exhibit nonlinear tolerance—being resilient to frequent low-level damage but highly vulnerable to infrequent severe damage—which stabilizes population dynamics and explains the persistence of green vegetation despite herbivore pressure.
This study reveals that *Candidatus* Liberibacter asiaticus manipulates the dopamine signaling axis by upregulating dopamine levels and suppressing the receptor DcDop2 via miR-31a to enhance lipid metabolism and fecundity in the Asian citrus psyllid, thereby promoting its own replication and establishing a coevolutionary relationship with its vector.
This paper provides a general theoretical explanation, validated by simulations and empirical data from *Daphnia* metacommunities, demonstrating that weak dispersal and larger landscape sizes jointly promote local biodiversity in heterogeneous competitive systems by linking species persistence to regional abundance, local invasion rates, and the feasibility domain.
This study of nearly 2,000 seabirds across five sub-Antarctic islands reveals that while specific host species and breeding behaviors (such as burrowing) significantly influence infectious agent community composition, temporal and spatial factors have limited impact, highlighting the complexity of host-pathogen interactions that cannot be fully explained by broad functional traits alone.
By introducing the Stress Degree Days (SDD) index to quantify chronic sublethal thermal stress, this study reveals that prolonged warming below lethal limits is driving significant fragmentation and cover loss in Mediterranean *Posidonia oceanica* meadows, with projections indicating severe habitat collapse under future climate scenarios.
This study demonstrates that in bacteriophage spatial expansions, optimal fitness traits and competitive outcomes are not determined by standard isolation metrics but are instead driven by the complex interplay between resource availability, system dimensionality, and ecological context.
This paper presents a fully automated pipeline using small, GPS-synchronized passive acoustic arrays to achieve accurate three-dimensional localization of bird vocalizations in complex forest soundscapes, demonstrating that such systems can recover ecologically meaningful spatial data without manual intervention.