Co‐variations in litter decomposition, leaf traits and plant growth in species from a Mediterranean old‐field succession
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary A growing consensus is developing that the impact of species on ecosystem properties is mediated, at least partially, by the traits of their component species. A previous study demonstrated that the field decomposition of complex litters produced by different communities of a Mediterranean successional sere was related to the average trait value of these communities. Here we scale down to the species level, to test whether similar relationships are found for selected species from these communities. We also test whether litter decomposability can be considered as part of the suite of traits characterizing the fast–slow growth continuum in plants. We chose 12 of the most abundant herbaceous species characteristics of three stages of the old‐field succession mentioned above. We investigated trait variation and covariation for the eight following traits: specific leaf area (SLA), leaf phosphorus (LPC), nitrogen (LNC) and carbon (LCC) concentrations, leaf dry matter content (LDMC) and leaf total phenols (TPh), all on material collected in the field; and litter decomposability ( K pot ) and maximum relative growth rate (RGR max ), obtained under standardized conditions in the laboratory. Five of these traits were significantly lower in species from the advanced successional stage. These trends were similar when comparisons were conducted either with the 12 species, or on a subset incorporating taxonomic information. LDMC was the single trait best correlated with species RGR max and K pot ; the two latter traits were also significantly correlated with one another. These results provide clear evidence of functional links between plant growth, leaf traits and litter decomposability. LDMC appears as a pivotal trait of living leaves related to their structural properties. It influences the quality of the litter produced, and hence species’ potential ‘after‐life effects’ on ecosystem properties.
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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) | 0.003 | 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