Effects of Double‐Crested Cormorants (<i>Phalacrocorax auritus</i> Less.) on Island Vegetation, Seedbank, and Soil Chemistry: Evaluating Island Restoration Potential
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The unique plant community on Middle Island, Lake Erie, Canada, has been greatly modified by double‐crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus Less.) whose population has increased enormously in the last two decades. The aims of this study were to assess the impact of cormorants on island tree canopy, understorey vegetation, soil seedbank, and soil chemistry. The ultimate objective was to assess the resilience of the vegetation community for recovery should cormorant nest densities decrease significantly. Forty‐three point stations were established in a grid system covering the entire island. The herbaceous and woody vegetation was surveyed over 2 years and tree crown damage was assessed at each point station. In 2008, soil samples were collected for both chemical analysis and a seedbank inventory. Vegetation and seedbank species richness were impoverished compared to the vegetation surveyed prior to cormorant colonization. Cormorants affected not only the tree canopy where they nested but also the understorey vegetation. Exotic plant species were very common in the standing vegetation and constituted the bulk of the abundance in the seedbank. However, there was little relationship between aboveground vegetation and seedbank composition. Cormorants appeared to have little influence on seedbank richness, abundance, and composition. Notably, several species of conservation interest were found in the aboveground vegetation and in the seedbank providing a positive sign for future efforts to restore island plant communities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".