Are tree trunks habitats or highways? A comparison of oribatid mite assemblages from hoop‐pine bark and litter
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Oribatid mites (Acari: Oribatida) are among the most diverse and abundant inhabitants of forest soil and litter, but also have species‐rich assemblages on bark and in the canopies of trees. It is unclear whether the trunk of a tree acts simply as a ‘highway’ for movement of mites into and out of the canopy, or whether the trunk has a distinctive acarofauna. We compare oribatid assemblages from the trunk bark of hoop pine ( Araucaria cunninghamii ) with those from litter collected beneath the same trees. A 1.0 by 0.5 m area of bark was sampled from three trees at each of five sites using a knockdown insecticide. A 1‐L sample of leaf litter was collected as close as possible to the base of each sampled tree. Mites were extracted using Tullgren funnels, identified to genus and morphospecies, and counted. Assemblages were almost 100% distinct, with only one oribatid morphospecies ( Pseudotocepheus sp.) collected from both litter and bark. Litter had a higher taxon richness than bark in total and per sample, but oribatids made up a greater percentage of the acarofauna in the bark samples. We had expected that the more consistent physical substrate of bark would be reflected in greater similarity of oribatid faunas on trunks than in litter; however, the opposite proved to be the case. We conclude that hoop‐pine trunks are habitats rather than highways for oribatid mites. Based on the observed higher turnover among bark faunas, tree trunks may represent habitat islands whose colonisation by particular oribatid species is more stochastic than that of the more continuous ‘sea’ of litter.
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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) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.002 | 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