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.
The paper introduces NicheDiv, an R package that adapts discriminant analysis of principal components (DAPC) to robustly quantify and characterize niche divergence across high-dimensional, collinear environmental spaces while addressing common methodological biases and identifying key drivers of ecological differentiation.
This study demonstrates that while parameters for Allee-effect population models are theoretically identifiable, accurate extinction-risk predictions critically depend on the quantity, quality, timing, and spatial resolution of observational data, as seemingly reliable estimates can still yield misleading forecasts.
This review highlights that while most studies on artificial light at night (ALAN) fail to account for lunar cycles, the available evidence suggests that moonlight often mitigates the biological impacts of ALAN, prompting the authors to propose hypotheses and best practices for integrating lunar data into future ecological research.
This study demonstrates that active retrogressive thaw slumps in the Canadian Arctic immediately release significant amounts of trapped biogenic methane and carbon dioxide upon exposure, suggesting that current permafrost carbon feedback models underestimate greenhouse gas emissions by overlooking the direct release of gases stored within frozen soil matrices.
By integrating empirical thermal scaling relationships into an intraguild predation model, this study demonstrates that warming can shift dominance between consumer and predator species through altered resource dynamics, even without differences in thermal optima, while identifying variance-based indicators as more reliable early warning signals for these transitions.
This study employs mathematical modeling to demonstrate that avian demographic traits, particularly breeding timing and offspring production, significantly influence West Nile virus transmission dynamics in northern Italy, highlighting the critical role of non-corvid species and the need for surveillance strategies that account for seasonal variations in competent host abundance.
Based on a field assessment revealing low and variable reproductive output in wild *Coffea eugenioides* populations in Rwanda, the report recommends shifting the seed orchard strategy from traditional seed collection to a clonal approach using grafting to ensure reliable germplasm conservation and restoration.
This study utilizes remote sensing data to reveal that global forest light use efficiency (LUE) exhibits a slight increasing trend and is jointly driven by plant traits and climatic conditions, with evergreen broadleaf forests showing the highest efficiency and statistical models explaining up to 98% of temporal variations.
This study demonstrates that current allometric equations systematically underestimate the biomass of large mangrove trees, creating significant uncertainty in carbon accounting, and highlights terrestrial laser scanning as a critical tool for improving these estimates to support effective mangrove conservation.
This study demonstrates that anthropogenic fire disturbance in Amazonian forests inverts the natural vertical stratification of microclimates, causing the understorey to become significantly hotter than the canopy during the day and cooler at night, with the capacity for temperature buffering being positively linked to aboveground carbon stocks.