Ecology

Ecology

eLife reviews research ranging from chemical and microbial ecology to plant-insect interactions and extinction risk. Learn more about what we review and sign up for the latest research.
Illustration by Davide Bonazzi

Latest articles

    1. Ecology
    2. Physics of Living Systems

    Cognitive simplicity drives collective route improvements in homing pigeons

    Shoubhik Chandan Banerjee, Fritz A Francisco, Albert B Kao
    A navigational model exploring social learning strategies differing in cognitive complexity in homing pigeons shows that simple averaging sufficiently explains collective route improvements, without requiring cumulative cultural evolution.
    1. Ecology

    Developmental constraints mediate the reversal of temperature effects on the autumn phenology of European beech after the summer solstice

    Dominic Rebindaine, Thomas W Crowther ... Constantin M Zohner
    Faster early-season development, especially under nighttime warming, advances the point at which the autumn phenology of European beech becomes responsive to late-summer cooling.
    1. Ecology

    Conservation Blind Spot: The Critical Role of Larval Stage in Assessing Extinction Risk

    Yanfang Song, Yongle Wang ... Weiwei Zhou
    Not revised
    Reviewed Preprint v1
    • Valuable
    • Incomplete
    1. Ecology

    Full factorial construction of synthetic microbial communities

    Juan Diaz-Colunga, Pablo Catalan ... Alvaro Sanchez
    A rapid, inexpensive, and easy to implement experimental protocol enables the construction of combinatorially complete sets of microbial consortia.
    1. Ecology
    2. Evolutionary Biology

    Rapid riparian ecosystem recovery in low-latitudinal North China following the end-Permian mass extinction

    Wenwei Guo, Li Tian ... Jinnan Tong
    In low-latitude North China, riparian ecosystems began to recover 2–3 million years after the end-Permian mass extinction.
    1. Ecology
    2. Neuroscience

    Drift in individual behavioral phenotype as a strategy for unpredictable worlds

    Ryan T Maloney, Athena Q Ye ... Benjamin L de Bivort
    Individual flies have idiosyncratic preferences that shift over their lifetime in a way that depends on genotype and may be adaptive to rapidly changing environmental pressures.
    1. Ecology
    2. Evolutionary Biology

    Adaptive variation in avian eggshell gas conductance and structure across elevational gradients?

    David Ocampo, Carlos Daniel Cadena ... Gustavo A Londoño
    In Neotropical birds, eggshells show that water vapor conductance declines with elevation, but structural responses vary across species, suggesting no single underlying mechanism and highlighting the need to further evaluate eggshell traits as determinants of elevational limits.
    1. Microbiology and Infectious Disease
    2. Ecology

    Environmental temperature is a strong driver of subspecies competition in the Drosophila microbiome

    Bosco Gracia-Alvira, Stefanie Migotti ... Christian Schlötterer
    Not revised
    Reviewed Preprint v1
    • Valuable
    • Solid
    1. Ecology

    Wetness modulates the effects of grazing on net ecosystem productivity in global grasslands

    Yueqiang Wu, Le Qi ... Biao Zhu
    Not revised
    Reviewed Preprint v1
    • Valuable
    • Convincing
    1. Neuroscience
    2. Ecology

    Machine learning of honey bee olfactory behavior identifies repellent odorants in free flying bees in the field

    Joel Kowalewski, Barbara Baer-Imhoof ... Anandasankar Ray
    Revised
    Reviewed Preprint v2
    Updated
    • Important
    • Solid
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Highlights

    1. Ecology

    Insect Migration: A sense of direction

    Aleksandr Pakhomov, Dmitry Kishkinev
    1. Ecology

    Disease Transmission: Interactions between wild pigs and the spread of disease

    Mercury Shitindo
    1. Ecology
    2. Evolutionary Biology

    Camouflage: Tiny particles help insects evade predators

    Lin Wang, Tak-Sing Wong

Senior editors

  1. Sergio Rasmann
    University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
  2. Meredith C Schuman
    University of Zurich, Switzerland
  3. See more editors