429 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 a framework based on Modern Coexistence Theory and community disassembly graphs to identify the timing and mechanistic causes of secondary extinctions across various species interactions, offering a flexible approach to understanding community disassembly.
This study identifies the Northern Red-backed Vole (*Clethrionomys rutilus*) as a likely reservoir for Borealpox virus by detecting the pathogen in both contemporary wild populations and historical museum specimens dating back to the late 1990s, suggesting the virus has been circulating in Alaskan small mammals for at least 25 years prior to the first reported human cases.
This study demonstrates that in king scallops (*Pecten maximus*), domoic acid accumulation is negatively correlated with body size during contamination but shifts to a positive correlation after prolonged depuration, a dynamic driven by the combined effects of faster toxin clearance in smaller individuals and toxin dilution through growth.
This study documents the 2021–2025 monitoring of advancing round goby populations in New York and Quebec via the Hudson/Champlain Canal and Saint Lawrence/Richelieu River approaches to Lake Champlain, utilizing eDNA and traditional sampling to map their proximity to the lake, assess temperature-driven habitat use, and detect viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus to inform invasive species management strategies.
By integrating historical spatial genetic structure with contemporary parentage analyses across four populations of *Dicorynia guianensis* in French Guiana, this study reveals contrasting patterns of gene dispersal and reproductive success that highlight the critical value of multi-temporal genetic approaches for assessing the demographic stability and conservation needs of tropical forest trees.
This study redefines vessel-whale close encounters using a dynamic Time to Potential Collision (TPC) metric to quantify risks in the Eastern North Atlantic, revealing that sperm and beaked whales are frequently involved and that factors like poor visibility, cargo ships, and inexperienced observers significantly reduce detection time, thereby underscoring the need for speed reductions and experienced marine mammal observers to mitigate collision risks.
This study analyzes 21 years of light trap data for the conifer silk moth *Dendrolimus superans* to develop three models that link weather-driven flight initiation, long-term population dynamics, and binary catch patterns, ultimately demonstrating that adult catch data can serve as a reliable proxy for larval density and enabling the analysis of sparse pest populations.
Over five decades of reforestation in Puerto Rico disproportionately increased suitable habitat for tree species that were already present, possessed broad climatic niches, and exhibited acquisitive functional traits, thereby potentially favoring generalists over specialists and reshaping community composition.
This study demonstrates that host plant species act as active ecological filters that reorganize microbial taxonomic composition and functional repertoires on the phylloplane through host-specific trait regimes, with pH regulation playing a role in this assembly process, rather than leaves serving as passive substrates.
This study synthesizes data from over 100 ectotherms to reveal that while heat tolerance (CTmax) generally correlates with thermal performance traits, the relationship varies by physiological process and timescale, suggesting that relying solely on CTmax may overestimate thermal safety margins for critical metabolic functions.