A comparative study of ecological specialization estimators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary 1. Ecological specialization is a unifying concept in the biological sciences. While there are reliable ways to characterize specificity at individual and community levels, the evaluation of population and species‐level measures is lacking. There is a need for such assessments given that populations and species are the relevant scales for most ecological and evolutionary processes. 2. Using examples of simulated and empirical data sets of bipartite networks representing a continuum of biological interactions, we evaluate six indices of specificity in terms of their robustness to incomplete sampling and information they extract from data. 3. Robustness differed between the measures and in their ability to differentiate specialists and generalists along a full continuum. On the empirical data sets, indices were less separated by their informativity than on the simulated data sets, which may be due to the heterogeneity of the former. 4. Based on these different evaluations for species‐level (or population‐level) specificity, we recommend the use of Resource range when no quantitative data are available and Paired Difference Index otherwise. These results will assist both applied and fundamental researchers in the characterization and interpretation of species specificity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.030 | 0.150 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".