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.
This study demonstrates that soil seedbanks of the grassland perennial *Potentilla freyniana* retain genetic diversity comparable to above-ground populations for decades after grassland conversion to plantation forests, highlighting their critical potential as genetic resources for future grassland restoration.
This study evaluates the ecological potential and socio-economic trade-offs of reintroducing diverse megaherbivore assemblages to Italian wood-pastures, concluding that while such rewilding could significantly enhance functional diversity and mitigate woody encroachment—particularly in Mediterranean regions—it requires context-dependent, participatory governance to balance ecosystem restoration with the management of associated disservices like crop damage and human-wildlife conflict.
In mature white spruce at Alaskan treelines, faster tree growth is associated with lower ectomycorrhizal fungal diversity rather than distinct community composition, suggesting that rapid growth may rely on the dominance of a specific subset of fungal partners instead of high fungal diversity.
This report documents the 2023–2026 monitoring of the San Nicolas Island southern sea otter population, revealing an 8.1% annual decline to 106 individuals, a reversion to historical west-end habitat usage following the disappearance of an east-end raft, and a diet dominated by sea urchins with an average energy intake of 7.7 kilocalories per minute.
This study presents the first basin-scale, multiyear assessment of North Pacific diatom communities using high-resolution rbcL metabarcoding, revealing significant environmental drivers of diversity and the unexpected prevalence of the centric species *Eunotogramma lunatum* in subarctic waters.
The paper introduces TreeTOP, a standardized, non-invasive experimental platform that enables manipulative ecological studies with potted plants across different canopy heights in diverse forest settings, successfully replicating natural microclimatic gradients to facilitate research on plant performance and ecosystem processes under realistic conditions.
This study introduces Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) as a non-invasive technique for 3D imaging of cyanobacterial colonies, demonstrating its ability to capture detailed mesoscale morphological features and quantify their impact on flotation velocity and light availability.
This paper introduces a dynamic biomass-based framework comprising Dynamic Area-based Robustness (DAR), Minimal Vital Species Sets (MVSS), and Cluster Influence (CI) to assess food-web functional resilience, revealing that biomass retention patterns and non-additive group effects provide critical insights beyond traditional structural and extinction-based metrics.
By integrating physiological performance data with Species Distribution Models, this study demonstrates that while winter survival limits the northern establishment range of the invasive alga *Rugulopteryx okamurae* to mid-Norway, its highest ecological impacts are projected to remain concentrated in southern Europe where thermal conditions support sustained year-round growth.
This paper demonstrates that a previous study's claim that stricter photovoltaic policies reduce bird diversity in China is invalid because it failed to adequately control for confounding sampling effort biases and data quality issues inherent in citizen science records, which, when corrected, render the reported negative effect statistically insignificant.