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 demonstrates that the physicochemical stability of field-collected mosquito breeding water during laboratory storage is significantly influenced by ambient humidity and temperature, necessitating strict environmental standardization and parameter monitoring to ensure bioassay reproducibility.
By analyzing metabolic processes across 1,100 global reefs, this study reveals that coral reef ecosystem functions exist on a continuous, context-dependent spectrum with uncoupled benthic and fish communities, demonstrating that natural variability and local conditions often outweigh human impacts and necessitating tailored conservation strategies over universal benchmarks.
The paper introduces CoralBlox, a computationally efficient and mechanistic discrete-time model designed to support rapid decision-making in coral reef management by simulating key ecological processes and validating against Great Barrier Reef data to evaluate diverse conservation strategies under climate change.
This study reveals that while the estuarine sea anemone *Nematostella vectensis* shares a core set of heat-stress genes across its geographic range, its transcriptional responses to temperature extremes vary significantly by latitude, with northern populations showing distinct cold-response patterns and southern populations exhibiting unique heat-response mechanisms driven by differential transcription factor binding.
This paper demonstrates that additive habitat-amount models fail to reliably infer independent configuration effects in observational datasets because habitat loss and configuration are geometrically coupled in a nonlinear, asymmetric manner, meaning that near-zero fragmentation coefficients reflect statistical artifacts of this coupling rather than a true absence of ecological impact.
Using MaxEnt modeling under low and high emission scenarios, this study predicts that climate change will significantly reshape global benthic amphipod distributions by 2100, with species-specific responses mediated by feeding ecology and driven by distinct environmental variables, ultimately threatening the functional composition and ecological roles of marine benthic communities.
A 36-year analysis in Hwange National Park reveals that wetlands with short hydroperiods are experiencing significant water surface declines driven by rising temperatures, posing a threat to associated vegetation and wildlife conservation.
This study reveals that pervasive genomic islands serve as major dynamic drivers of giant virus evolution by facilitating extensive genome plasticity, mosaicism, and host adaptation through frequent rearrangements and large-scale genetic exchange with bacteria.
By integrating machine learning and Bayesian modeling on over 41,000 plant observations, this study demonstrates that combining environmental conditions with a host's prior infection history significantly improves the prediction of disease risk and reveals that pathogen-pathogen interactions can be as critical as abiotic factors in driving seasonal epidemics.
Through a structured decision-making process involving a population model, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and US Fish and Wildlife Service identified a sustainable recovery strategy for the endangered Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit that prioritizes expanding conservation breeding, continuing annual RHDV2 vaccinations, and targeting translocations to establishing recovery areas while also emphasizing habitat protection and improved monitoring.