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.
By comparing global modern and fossil planktonic foraminifera data, this study demonstrates that while space-for-time substitution correctly predicts the direction of marine biodiversity responses to temperature change, it consistently overestimates the magnitude of those changes.
This paper introduces WIO-ReefFish, a high-resolution dataset of 1,000 ultra-high-definition images with 6,768 annotations for 24 taxonomic categories from the Western Indian Ocean, which serves as a realistic benchmark demonstrating that while class-agnostic fish localization is robust, taxonomic discrimination remains a significant challenge for automated coral reef monitoring.
This paper proposes a quantitative "murburn" formalism demonstrating that intermediate oxygen tensions in micro-oxic ecosystems drive biodiversity by generating dynamic redox heterogeneity and diffusible reactive species, which create shifting fitness landscapes that spontaneously enable species coexistence and diversification without requiring external niche partitioning.
This study demonstrates that in the Finnish boreal zone, bunker length is the primary determinant of hibernating bat abundance and species composition, with longer structures supporting higher numbers of *Myotis* and *Plecotus auritus* while *Eptesicus nilssonii* utilizes bunkers of varying sizes but remains less abundant.
This paper introduces an IPM-DRL framework that integrates detailed ecological population modeling with deep reinforcement learning to generate superior, data-driven adaptive management strategies for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow, significantly outperforming existing heuristic approaches in balancing population persistence and genetic health.
PAMalytics is an open-source, no-code application that standardizes and streamlines the post-classification validation of passive acoustic monitoring detections, thereby reducing manual effort and enhancing traceability for biodiversity research and reporting.
This study utilizes machine learning and cloud computing to generate a high-resolution, annual (1985–2025) geospatial dataset of coastal Louisiana wetland vegetation assemblages, achieving 78% classification accuracy to support the region's $50 billion restoration efforts.
This study utilizes species distribution models to demonstrate that *Culex coronator*'s rapid range expansion across the United States is driven by increasing environmental suitability in humid subtropical regions, a trend that historical models failed to predict but contemporary and future projections successfully capture, highlighting the critical need to update occurrence data for effective surveillance and control.
This study demonstrates that while selective logging in French Guiana alters dispersal dynamics and reproductive patterns of *Dicorynia guianensis*, it does not cause immediate genetic erosion, highlighting the species' resilience under current management practices while underscoring the need for long-term monitoring to ensure sustainable recruitment.
A resurvey of northern pika populations in Hokkaido, Japan, reveals that while rising summer temperatures drive upslope range shifts and local extinctions, habitat size is an even stronger determinant of the species' persistence, highlighting the critical need for preserving large, heterogeneous habitats to ensure long-term viability.