Effects of in‐channel beaver impoundments on mercury bioaccumulation in Rocky Mountain stream food webs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beavers ( Castor spp.) are ecosystem engineers and important modifiers of freshwater ecosystems. They create impoundments that flood the surrounding landscape and modify the flow of materials through streams, thus potentially increasing nutrients, productivity and the availability of toxic methyl mercury (MeHg) to downstream food webs. Here we quantify food web‐available MeHg in water, periphyton, and invertebrates collected from 15 streams up‐ and down‐stream from beaver impoundments in the Rocky Mountain foothills of Western Canada. While nutrients, algal biomass, and total invertebrate standing stock were not significantly elevated below ponds, MeHg concentrations (average increase of 1.7×) and percent of total Hg that was MeHg (average increase of 1.3×) showed a trend of higher values in all compartments downstream and the difference was significant in predatory invertebrates. This suggests that beaver impoundments can increase the availability and subsequent uptake of MeHg by basal food web organisms even if their immediate influence on nutrients and resources is limited. As beaver populations continue to rebound, more research is needed to fully characterise the effects of beavers on nutrient and contaminant cycling under different biogeochemical conditions.
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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".