🌿 Category

ecology

429 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.

🌿 ecology

Leveraging collaborations between researchers, wildlife managers and citizen-volunteers to monitor endangered carnivore populations across space and time

This study demonstrates that a collaborative framework integrating fecal DNA-based individual identification, Spatially Explicit Capture-Recapture models, and multi-stakeholder participation involving forest officials and citizen volunteers effectively enables sustainable, landscape-level monitoring of dhole populations in India's Western Ghats while building long-term institutional capacity.

Srivathsa, A., Shukla, M., Saravanan, P., Ganguly, D., Mohan, M., Ramakrishnan, U.2026-09-21
🌿 ecology

Mining association rules for targeted spatiotemporal aquatic environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling

This paper demonstrates how unsupervised association rule mining, implemented in a new R package called RulesTools, can effectively uncover complex relationships between environmental covariates and brook trout eDNA concentrations or electrofishing outcomes from a small dataset, thereby offering a novel tool to guide targeted eDNA sampling and inform conservation decisions.

Toth, N., Antonie, L., Hanner, R. H., Gillis, D. J., Phillips, J. D.2026-09-18
🌿 ecology

Long-term liana infestation leaves architectural legacies in host trees

Using a 14-year longitudinal dataset and terrestrial laser scanning on Barro Colorado Island, this study demonstrates that persistent liana infestation causally reduces host tree height and crown size, indicating that increasing liana abundance will progressively diminish tropical forest stature and carbon storage potential.

Young, R., Muller-Landau, H. C., Meunier, F., Verbeeck, H., Krishna Moorthy, S. M., Salguero-Gomez, R.2026-09-18
🌿 ecology

A global assessment of how biodiversity enhances agroecosystem function

This global assessment of 184 relationships demonstrates that biodiversity-enhancing approaches, particularly crop diversification, generally improve agroecosystem multifunctionality, suggesting that combining diverse management strategies is essential for achieving sustainable agricultural production alongside broader ecosystem benefits.

Morris, O. F., Bullock, J. M., Moffett, E., Woodward, G., Pearse, W. D.2026-09-17
🌿 ecology

Tolerance to herbicide drift in "weedy" species is context-dependent and driven by early vegetative growth

This study demonstrates that the tolerance of weedy plant species to sublethal herbicide drift is context-dependent and driven by early vegetative growth, with environmental factors like insect herbivory and developmental traits influencing how these species maintain fitness and shape community composition in agroecosystems.

Iriart, V., Ashman, T.-L., Armstrong, M. R., Colom, S., Newsum, T., Soble Botran, A., Baucom, R.2026-09-16
🌿 ecology

Bayesian spatial prediction of livestock tick abundance to support surveillance in data-sparse regions

This study demonstrates that Bayesian spatial modeling can effectively transform fragmented, heterogeneous veterinary surveillance data into uncertainty-aware, district-level abundance predictions for *Rhipicephalus microplus* and *Hyalomma anatolicum* ticks in Pakistan, thereby providing a transferable framework to optimize surveillance targeting in data-sparse regions.

Hussain, A., Hussain, S., Bravo de Guenni, L., Smith, R. L.2026-09-14