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 global meta-analysis demonstrates that biochar amendments consistently reduce soil thermal conductivity, diffusivity, and volumetric heat capacity, primarily driven by changes in bulk density and modulated by application rate and soil texture, highlighting the need to integrate these intrinsic thermal property shifts into land-surface models.
This study demonstrates that incorporating individual heterogeneity in invasive American mink residency status reveals that targeted removal of resident individuals, rather than blanket population control, is more effective for protecting native water voles, as the spatial scale of predation impact varies significantly between resident and transient predators.
This study demonstrates that spatiotemporal variations in salmon-derived nutrient inputs restructure riparian fungal communities by differentially affecting saprotrophs and ectomycorrhizal fungi, highlighting the complex relationship between nutrient dynamics, fungal functional traits, and taxonomic diversity.
By analyzing otolith microchemistry from over 3,600 European eels, this study reveals high individual variation in habitat use along a salinity gradient, identifying distinct life-history strategies including coastal residency and migration, which underscores the critical need to incorporate coastal habitats into conservation and population management efforts for this critically endangered species.
This study presents the first systematic evaluation of intra-African geographic domain shift in wildlife camera trap classification by comparing supervised, retrieval-based, and zero-shot foundation models across diverse Southern African datasets to provide practical guidance for deploying conservation AI without new labelled data.
This study utilizes an agent-based model to demonstrate that red fox mange transmission in urban landscapes is accelerated by landscape heterogeneity and movement corridors, particularly when infected and susceptible foxes exhibit similar movement probabilities through fragmented habitats.
The MosAICo ecosystem is an AI-powered, standardized hardware-software pipeline that overcomes the taxonomic bottleneck in mosquito surveillance by achieving high-accuracy, real-time automated identification of priority vector species while effectively flagging unknown specimens for expert review, thereby scaling national and cross-border disease monitoring efforts.
This study reveals that the phytoplankton *Heterosigma akashiwo* sustains algal blooms under resource-limited conditions by leveraging high cell densities to trigger bioconvection, a self-generated active flow that facilitates multiscale transport, restores metabolic function, and mitigates ecological stress.
This paper proposes a mathematical model combined with a feedback control strategy and a Luenberger observer to optimize the release of sterile male New World screwworms, demonstrating that eradication of the pest in Mexico is achievable within 60–100 weeks through targeted releases within a 120 km radius.
This study of West African secondary forests reveals that while soil bacterial and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities rapidly reorganize and stabilize internally within a decade of agricultural abandonment, they fail to converge toward old-growth reference states even after 43 years, suggesting that passive regeneration alone is insufficient to restore native microbial assemblages within ecologically relevant timescales.