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 demonstrates that applying temperature corrections to environmental DNA (eDNA) data based on field-derived estimates compromises the ability to infer fish abundance in seasonal systems, as these corrections inadvertently remove the abundance signal along with the temperature effect, whereas corrections based on laboratory metabolic rates or uncorrected data remain reliable predictors.
This study demonstrates that while full-length COI barcodes improve the detection of sequencing artifacts like NUMTs and chimeras, the standard ~658 bp mini-barcode remains the optimal marker for soil animal eDNA metabarcoding by effectively balancing target recovery, taxonomic assignment confidence, and ecological interpretability.
This study demonstrates that while standardized light traps are effective for monitoring Baltic Sea sticklebacks and filling a winter monitoring gap for littoral mysids, accurate mysid sampling requires mandatory predator exclusion and must account for the method's low statistical power for detecting gradual population changes due to strong seasonal and spatial aggregation effects.
This study demonstrates that near-future background warming amplifies the ecological impacts of natural heatwaves in freshwater communities by pushing key grazers beyond their thermal thresholds, which triggers cascading effects that restructure the entire food web.
By integrating field naturalism with Bayesian modeling across a broad Himalayan gradient, this study demonstrates that the interaction between frost events and fog probability, rather than altitude alone, is the primary driver shaping vegetation growth form partitioning and species distribution.
The paper introduces DATRASextra, an open-source R package designed to streamline the processing, harmonization, and analysis of ICES DATRAS bottom-trawl survey data through modular, reproducible workflows.
Using high-frequency in situ imaging to overcome sampling limitations, this study reveals that mixotrophic Rhizaria protists exhibit complex ecological behaviors, including superior control over their vertical position and orientation in the water column compared to non-mixotrophic taxa, and likely employ active buoyancy control during symbiont acquisition.
This study demonstrates that heatwaves reduce parasitism and increase survival in winter-adapted mosquito populations across diverse geographic regions by enabling larvae to evade infection, with effects that are consistent across populations and predictable from fundamental thermal performance curves rather than local adaptation.
This study demonstrates that diet specialization in Norwegian raptors drives distinct reproductive strategies and foraging efficiencies, where specialists generally exhibit higher reproductive output and outcompete generalists unless the latter can access unique prey resources.
This study reveals that while rice field harvesting and ploughing events trigger short-term surges in waterbird numbers due to increased food availability, these gatherings do not enhance individual foraging performance or reduce vigilance, suggesting birds are attracted by the perception of a feast through local enhancement rather than actual foraging benefits.