312 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 reveals that rodent activity enriches burrow soils with nitrate, which restructures amoeba-bacteria interactions to favor pathogenic bacterial taxa and enhance infectious disease-related functional potential, thereby linking rodent-driven soil heterogeneity to zoonotic pathogen emergence.
This study characterizes the diverse and variable seed microbiota of four major crops across different genotypes and production modes, revealing distinct ecological drivers for bacteria and fungi while establishing a comprehensive culture collection that highlights the complementary value of combining culturomics and sequencing for discovering potential bioinoculants.
This study of Nathusius pipistrelles in the Netherlands reveals that autumn migration stopover departure decisions and diverse movement patterns are driven by a complex interaction between intrinsic factors like reproductive status and environmental conditions such as wind and weather, highlighting the need to account for this behavioral variability in conservation planning.
The paper introduces SWARM, an AI agent-based modeling framework that integrates Large Language Models with biophysical simulations to overcome the limitations of static dispersal models by enabling Red Snapper larvae to exhibit adaptive behaviors, thereby improving the prediction of marine connectivity and informing ecosystem restoration strategies.
This study reveals that the microbiota of the polyphagous fly *Drosophila suzukii* is primarily shaped by life stage, while its yeast communities are specifically driven by the host fruit, suggesting that both core and niche-specific microbes are horizontally acquired from the environment.
This study of Japanese natural forests reveals that while tree communities are slowly shifting toward warmer-adapted species (thermophilization), the resulting growing mismatch between community composition and ambient temperature (climatic debt) significantly constrains forest primary productivity, highlighting the critical need to monitor community-level thermal responses for sustaining ecosystem functioning under climate change.
Using X-ray reconstruction (XROMM), this study demonstrates that songbirds achieve primate-like dexterity in seed manipulation through the highly coordinated, multi-dimensional movements of the beak and tongue, with specialized mechanics tailored to their specific biting strength.
This study demonstrates that utilizing quantitative Cycle threshold (Ct) values from mosquito pools, rather than binarizing them, significantly improves West Nile virus prevalence estimation and risk assessment by revealing underlying biological dynamics and outperforming traditional methods at high infection rates.
This study demonstrates that increasing both the unpalatability of aposematic models and the absolute density of the prey community significantly reduces predation on imperfect Batesian mimics, highlighting absolute community density as a critical, yet underappreciated, factor in shaping mimicry dynamics.
This study demonstrates that integrating multi-sensor remote sensing data (Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Aerial LiDAR) can effectively upscale key dimensions of terrestrial habitat structure measured by Terrestrial Laser Scanning across diverse island ecosystems, although accurately capturing fine-scale structural complexity remains a significant challenge.