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 study demonstrates that topographically driven microrefugia within a regional climate-change refugium in Nebraska sustain disproportionate understory plant biodiversity by buffering microclimates, highlighting the critical need to protect both regional and fine-scale refugia to conserve plant communities amidst ongoing macroclimate change.
An analysis of 244 forest-based carbon projects reveals that social risks are systematically underestimated, suggesting that credits from failed projects could soon exceed registry reserves and necessitate stronger safeguards to ensure climate benefits.
This study introduces a novel "Hubbell regression" model to analyze 1.78 million arthropod samples globally, revealing that actual evapotranspiration is the primary driver of diversity while high human activity significantly reduces insect richness in tropical and dry zones but increases it in polar regions.
This paper presents an open-source, standardized framework utilizing small, modular ROVs equipped with custom navigation and processing software to enable consistent, high-resolution benthic imaging in temperate kelp forests, effectively complementing traditional diver surveys while overcoming limitations in safety, depth, and spatial coverage.
By integrating high-throughput sequencing with 3D photogrammetry, this study demonstrates that the geometric complexity and structural heterogeneity of *Hydnophora microconos* coral colonies facilitate the co-occurrence of diverse *Symbiodiniaceae* genera, particularly influencing the vertical distribution of *Durusdinium* and *Cladocopium* in relation to light availability.
This study employs a temperature-dependent stoichiometric model to demonstrate that contrasting thermal responses in herbivore phosphorus and carbon demands differentially shape population persistence and stability, with increased phosphorus needs primarily limiting the temperature range for survival while increased carbon needs mainly influence system stability under nutrient enrichment.
This study demonstrates that using a stochastic model to fit variability across microbial replicates, rather than fitting deterministic models to averages, significantly improves the accuracy of ecological parameter inference and provides a Bayesian framework for quantifying uncertainty.
This study demonstrates that while multiple simultaneous global change perturbations generally negatively impact grassland functionality, the inclusion of plant-soil interactions in realistic mesocosm settings reveals that plants can mitigate synergistic effects and that drought acts as the dominant driver of ecosystem responses.
This study demonstrates that earthworm invasion in North American forests reduces overall ecosystem multidiversity and multifunctionality through both direct and indirect pathways, highlighting the critical need for a whole-ecosystem perspective to fully understand the complex consequences of biological invasions.
This study provides a comparative analysis of the floristic composition, phenology, and conservation value of four peat bogs in Bucovina, Romania, highlighting a shared core of peatland taxa while noting the unique presence of the glacial relict *Betula nana* at the Gaina-Lucina site.