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.
This study demonstrates that metabolic processes in microbial communities generate a skewed "many weak, few strong" interaction distribution, which is better modeled by a lognormal rather than a Gaussian distribution, thereby significantly improving the accuracy of community diversity predictions.
This study reveals that species distribution models trained on contaminated citizen-science data systematically overpredict habitat suitability at stream headwaters due to shared bias across ensemble members, a spatially structured failure that standard calibration methods miss but can be resolved through network-position-stratified (Mondrian) calibration.
This study demonstrates that even along heavily urbanized and nourished coastlines, reducing human disturbance allows pioneer strandline vegetation to establish and significantly enhance natural sand retention and embryo dune formation, offering a cost-effective, nature-based complement to engineered coastal defenses.
This study demonstrates that artificial light at night can biologically impact organisms over distances exceeding one to three kilometers in rural and developing areas, with the extent of this footprint heavily dependent on the interaction between light characteristics and environmental factors like vegetation density and topography.
This study demonstrates that movement strategies, particularly the ability to align or flexibly adapt activity timing and space use to predictable human cycles, are key mechanisms determining the varying success of red foxes, raccoons, and wild boars in urban environments.
In the sea anemone *Cylista elegans*, asexual reproduction via pedal laceration is fueled by feeding but temporarily suppressed during digestion, creating a rhythmic cycle where the timing of laceration strictly follows the frequency of meals rather than the total amount of food consumed.
By employing BONCAT-FACS-Seq to analyze the active subset of soil microbes, this study demonstrates that nitrous oxide production is driven not by a single dominant species but by shifting ensembles of active organisms, suggesting that framing denitrification as a community trait could significantly improve the predictability of this greenhouse gas emission.
This study demonstrates that restoring tropical dry evergreen forests in southern India with native species can achieve carbon sequestration levels comparable to non-native trees while maintaining high biodiversity, proving that ecological integrity and climate mitigation goals can be successfully balanced.
Although southern elephant seals exhibit substantial at-sea overlap that theoretically enables inter-colony transmission of HPAI H5N1, the study concludes that seal-to-seal spread between breeding colonies is unlikely, despite the potential for the virus to reach Macquarie Island via other pathways.
This study develops and applies a reproducible analytical framework using camera-trap data to demonstrate that mass mortality events create extended windows of scavenger-carcass activity compared to single carcasses, thereby increasing the potential for pathogen transmission.