237 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 introduces the Biodiversity Pressure Index (BPI), a global-scale tool covering 1990–2020, which reveals that nearly all terrestrial areas have experienced increased human pressure over the past three decades, with tropical regions and wetlands facing particularly severe and rapidly growing impacts from drivers like climate change and trade.
An experimental study in the Canary Islands found that lighting conditions permitted under the "Sky Law" regulations, designed to protect astronomical observations, had no significant impact on the behavior of breeding Cory's shearwaters or bats, with environmental factors like moonlight and seasonality proving to be stronger behavioral drivers.
This paper introduces the Climademic Suitability Model, a machine learning framework that maps global monthly habitat suitability for *Aedes aegypti* and *Aedes albopictus* from 1975 to 2024, revealing that climate-driven expansion has already exposed over 5 billion people to these vectors, surpassing previous 2050 projections.
This collaborative study in Kali Tiger Reserve, Western Ghats, documents the distribution and habitat correlates of three hornbill species, revealing that Malabar Grey Hornbills are the most abundant and positively associated with food-tree density, while noting that low detection rates for Pied and Great Hornbills likely reflect seasonal breeding behaviors.
This systematic review and meta-analysis reveals that low-quality evidence dominates the discourse on the carbon benefits of alternative grazing strategies, as high-quality studies found no significant increase in soil organic carbon, underscoring the urgent need for more rigorous research before claiming climate mitigation benefits.
Contrary to the prevailing view that phenotypic plasticity buffers species against environmental collapse, this study demonstrates through a novel mathematical framework that the feedback mechanisms between organism and population can actually induce tipping points, thereby increasing the risk of abrupt and irreversible population shifts.
This study analyzes 11 years of fisheries acoustic data in the California Current System to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of mid-trophic level organisms, revealing distinct cross-shore, seasonal, and latitudinal patterns in acoustic backscatter and exploring their relationships with environmental variables.
This study reveals that metabolic activity in diverse microbial communities follows a long-tailed lognormal distribution where a small fraction of highly active cells disproportionately drives ecosystem respiration, demonstrating that ignoring this metabolic inequality can lead to significant biases in predicting large-scale biogeochemical dynamics.
This study demonstrates that semi-synthetic ergosterol-derived compounds, particularly compound 4 for serine proteinases and compounds 2 and 3 for phospholipase A2, effectively inhibit key *Bothrops asper* venom enzymes through hydrophobic and electrostatic interactions, suggesting their potential as adjuvants for treating snakebite-induced local damage.
This study introduces a generalized tuning framework for the BirdFlow model that integrates eBird distribution data with multiple individual-tracking sources (GPS, banding, and telemetry) to generate biologically realistic, continental-scale population-level migration forecasts for 153 North American bird species, including data-limited species modeled via taxonomically informed hyperparameter transfer.