Moderate Human Disturbance of Rain Forest Alters Composition of Fruiting Plant and Bird Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Forests worldwide are experiencing rapid environmental change due to human activity. We aimed to increase understanding of anthropogenic impacts on community composition and species interactions. In a natural experiment, we asked whether subsistence human land use has altered the community composition of a Neotropical rain forest on the island of Tobago, in the West Indies. We surveyed fruiting plants and birds in three adjacent habitat types that varied in level of disturbance, and used multivariate analyses to determine whether changes in the plant community were associated with differences in avifauna composition. The three forest habitats had similar plant and bird diversities, yet markedly different species compositions and abundances. Primary forest had the most diverse plant community, while disturbed habitats had a more homogeneous plant composition. Primary and disturbed forest had distinct community compositions, with canopy cover and the relative abundance of plant types explaining 83 percent of the variation in bird species assemblages. Seemingly moderate human disturbance has led to substantial changes in the plant and bird assemblages of Tobago's rain forest, outside of a protected reserve. Our study highlights the direct links between human disturbance and the structure of rain forests, underscoring the impact of even moderate activity on community composition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".