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 microplastic pollution drives both linear and threshold-type shifts in soil multifunctionality, with physical deterioration—specifically the loss of water-stable aggregates—serving as an early-warning signal that precedes cascading impacts on chemical and biological processes.
This bibliometric study analyzes global research trends in grassland root functional traits from 2000 to 2025, identifying key producing nations, six major research hotspots including trait-climate interactions and soil microbe synergies, and outlining future directions for methodological standardization and international collaboration.
This study reveals that Bornean rainforests experienced a significant acceleration in resilience loss starting in 2004, driven by a complex interplay of climate change, human activity, and declining biodiversity, which collectively heighten the risk of irreversible forest dieback.
This study demonstrates that carefully aligned soil-based eDNA sampling and analytical strategies can effectively serve as a stand-alone tool for simultaneously detecting rare plant species and monitoring compositional changes in terrestrial grassland communities.
By integrating iNaturalist citizen science data with herbarium records, this study reveals that urbanization in tropical landscapes significantly extends plant reproductive duration and weakens seasonality, with these effects being most pronounced in seasonal, annual, and herbaceous species.
This study demonstrates that a spectrogram-based convolutional neural network can automatically and accurately detect and analyze the "knocking" vocalizations of endangered Saimaa ringed seals in extensive underwater datasets, offering a cost-effective solution for long-term species monitoring.
This study reveals that while small-scale vegetable farms, particularly in high tunnels, often exhibit excessive nutrient and salt accumulation posing environmental risks, adopting conservation practices like reduced tillage, organic management, and plant-based composts can significantly improve soil health.
This study demonstrates that 3D-printed artificial flowers serve as a superior attractant for automated insect camera traps compared to traditional methods, effectively increasing the abundance and diversity of key pollinators like hoverflies and bumblebees while maintaining comparable attraction rates for other insect groups.
The paper introduces COLLEMBOT, an AI-based automated counting tool using YOLOv11 that significantly reduces the time and labor required for OECD 232 soil toxicity tests while maintaining high accuracy and regulatory reliability compared to manual counting.
This study uses an individual-based model to demonstrate that consumer body size and habitat specialization differentially shape landscape-scale resource heterogeneity, with specialists increasing spatial variation regardless of size while generalists erode it, particularly as their body size increases.