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.
This study demonstrates that in a 16-species synthetic microbial community, total carbon availability is a more critical driver of compositional dynamics and tristable state transitions than resource complexity, with competitive success shifting from being determined by lag phase duration at low carbon levels to maximum growth rate at high levels.
Through long-term field experiments in mature oak forests, this study demonstrates that while both drought and elevated CO2 slow litter decomposition, drought exerts a stronger influence by altering the decomposition environment, whereas elevated CO2 primarily affects decomposability through changes in initial litter properties.
This study quantifies B-vitamin dynamics and their relationship with microbial communities across the Neuse River Estuary, revealing that elevated mid-estuary vitamin concentrations and significant short-term variability are key drivers of plankton composition, thereby highlighting the complex role of these micronutrients in estuarine biogeochemistry.
This study presents a radiometric model to calculate the reliable detection range of cetaceans using infrared imaging systems across various environmental conditions, enabling performance evaluation without the need for extensive at-sea data collection.
This study utilizes survey data and geostatistical modeling to map the spatial risks of contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, foot-and-mouth disease, and lumpy skin disease in Ethiopia, revealing distinct associations with bioclimatic variables and providing reliable risk maps to support climate-informed disease early warning systems.
This study validates the effectiveness of climate reanalysis products in reconstructing air temperature patterns and detecting heatwaves on Atlantic Patagonian rocky shores, demonstrating their utility in complementing local data to investigate ecological impacts like mussel mass mortalities while suggesting that heatwaves alone may not fully explain these losses.
This paper introduces an efficient, interpretable hyperbolic equation with independent parameters to model environmental threshold effects, which was successfully applied to analyze how soil water deficit and summer temperature constraints impact the growth of 18 European forest tree species.
Using a spatially explicit framework applied to Switzerland, this study demonstrates that trade-off-based siting strategies for renewable energy can effectively balance energy production with biodiversity conservation, significantly reducing ecological impacts compared to purely efficiency-driven approaches.
This study demonstrates that hyperspectral remote sensing can effectively distinguish the harmful diatom *Pseudo-nitzschia* from other benign diatom genera in the Northeast Pacific by identifying a unique spectral fingerprint around 560 nm, offering a scalable alternative to traditional in situ sampling for harmful algal bloom detection.
This study proposes an ecosystem-based approach using production-to-biomass (P/B) ratios to establish protective harvest limits for native "rough" fishes, demonstrating that many long-lived nongame species have turnover rates similar to popular game fish and therefore require similarly conservative management to ensure sustainability.