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.
Although chronic predation risk induced persistent, sex-specific changes in antipredator behavior and swim endurance in male threespine stickleback, it did not result in long-term physiological costs such as shortened telomere length or stunted growth.
This paper introduces Multiple Imputation Step Selection Analysis (MiSSA), a novel method that improves the accuracy of travel distance estimation in animal movement studies by addressing the underestimation bias inherent in conventional Integrated Step Selection Analysis (iSSA) caused by linear interpolation assumptions.
By integrating climate-driven fish biomass projections with fishing effort and socioeconomic vulnerability, this study identifies Southeast Asia, western Africa, and the West Pacific as critical risk hotspots where nations with low adaptive capacity face disproportionate threats, suggesting that targeted area-based interventions and improved governance are essential to mitigate these socioeconomic risks.
This study demonstrates that satellite imagery can effectively detect significant reductions in beaver pond surface water area on Michipicoten Island following a major beaver population decline caused by grey wolves, establishing a cost-effective method for monitoring large-scale beaver population trends in the boreal zone.
This study presents the first reward-ring analysis of European ducks, revealing that approximately two-thirds of standard rings are reported and that harvest mortality is highest immediately after ringing before declining in subsequent years due to selective survival and behavioral adaptation.
The paper presents the design, assembly, and field validation of ALANizer, a novel, low-cost, and scalable open-source tool for introducing and monitoring artificial light at night in ecosystems to study its impacts on arthropods.
This study demonstrates that fences and roads in the hyper-arid Greater Sossusvlei Namib Landscape significantly restrict ungulate movements and reduce home ranges, with varying degrees of impact across species like springbok and gemsbok, thereby highlighting specific barriers that require modification to restore habitat connectivity.
This study demonstrates that real-time closures (RTCs) are more effective than static closures for managing the Gulf of Thailand's short mackerel fishery, as they offer greater flexibility, require smaller closure areas, and successfully mitigate fishing mortality for migratory species by utilizing near real-time surveillance data.
This study provides empirical evidence that compensatory density-dependent mortality commonly regulates early-life survival across diverse fish taxa in the Gulf of Thailand, suggesting that juvenile removal via trash fish catches does not necessarily reduce long-term productivity due to these self-regulating mechanisms.
Based on long-term surveys in the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific, this study reveals that while marine fish have experienced substantial warming in their realized thermal niches over the past three decades, their spatial redistributions across latitude, longitude, and depth have been generally small and region-specific, challenging the assumption that species can effectively shift their ranges to escape rising ocean temperatures.