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.
Through a global meta-analysis of 91 bat species, this study reveals that despite varying latitudes and local conditions, bats consistently time their emergence to occur within conserved brightness thresholds (nautical twilight) to balance foraging and predation risks, a pattern influenced by both environmental cues and shared ancestry.
This study demonstrates that experimental hut design significantly influences mosquito behavior and the predicted reduction in vectorial capacity of insecticide-treated nets, highlighting the critical need to account for structural variations in trial settings when forecasting population-level transmission impacts.
This paper presents two methods—a Monte Carlo estimation and a computationally efficient Jacobian-based approximation—for calculating absolute time-difference-of-arrival positioning error in underwater acoustic telemetry, enabling the derivation of error covariance matrices and expected radial error statistics.
Using an 18-year dataset and Bayesian structural equation modeling, this study demonstrates that pre-diapause survival in the butterfly *Euphydryas gillettii* is determined by the complex interplay of weather, climate teleconnections, and intraguild predation, where abiotic factors exert both direct effects and indirect effects that reverse direction when mediated through biotic interactions.
This study demonstrates that in spatially heterogeneous environments, the tempo of evolutionary diversification is shaped by dynamic eco-evolutionary feedbacks where migration load initially hinders local adaptation through density-driven influx of maladapted immigrants, but later accelerates divergence as increasing specialization reduces competitive asymmetries and effective migration rates.
This study utilizes convolutional neural networks and multi-source satellite imagery to demonstrate that incorporating phenological and topographical indices improves ghost forest detection, revealing that 21% of North Carolina's coastal forests were lost between 1985 and 2021 due to accelerating sea-level rise, salinity, and proximity to channels, with the rate of conversion to marshes and ghost forests increasing significantly in the last decade.
This study compares the functional stability of vertebrate communities in Côte d'Ivoire's Taï and Comoe National Parks over a decade, revealing that the rainforest Taï Park relies on high resilience and interspecific asynchrony for dynamic stability, whereas the savannah Comoe Park exhibits conservative stability through temporal regularity but shows signs of crossing a functional degradation threshold due to a lack of calculable resilience.
This global meta-analysis reveals that mosquito predation efficacy is driven more by functional traits like dietary specialization and body size than by broad taxonomic identity, highlighting the need for evidence-based trait-matching and multi-duration assessments to optimize biological control strategies over chemical insecticides.
This paper presents a theoretical framework demonstrating that passive eDNA accumulation dynamics are governed by substrate capacity and the retention of degraded DNA, revealing that deployment duration alone cannot optimize sampling because high DNA input can paradoxically yield lower detectable signals under certain conditions.
This study utilizes Oxford Nanopore metagenomics to demonstrate that while the reintroduction of European bison to West Blean and Thornden Woods caused only modest shifts in soil taxonomic diversity, it significantly altered microbial functional composition, revealing a decoupling between species diversity and ecosystem function during early-stage rewilding.