Source and sink dynamics in meta‐ecosystems
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present a theory extending the source-sink concept with an ecosystem perspective. We analyze a model for meta-ecosystem dynamics in a heterogeneous environment to study how the spatial flows of materials such as inorganic nutrients and nutrients sequestered into producers, herbivores, and detritus affect the community dynamics. We show that spatial flows of an inorganic nutrient (direct nutrient flow) and organic matter (indirect nutrient flow) through detritus, producer, or herbivore compartments can reverse the source-sink dynamics of a local ecosystem. More precisely, the balance between such direct and indirect nutrient flows determines the net direction of nutrient flows between two ecosystems of contrasted productivities. It allows a sink to turn into a source and vice versa. This effect of nutrient flows on source and sink dynamics is robust to the ecosystem structure (with and without herbivores) and to specific ecosystem compartments contributing to nutrient flows (primary producers, herbivores, or detritus). Ecosystems in distinct localities thus interact together with the structure at one place influencing that of the other. In meta-ecosystems, the source-sink dynamics of an organism is not only constrained by its dispersal from the source to the sink, but also by the fertility and community composition in the neighborhood responsible for spatial flows of nutrients and energy. The meta-ecosystem perspective provides a powerful theoretical framework to address novel questions in spatial ecosystem ecology.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 it