Ecological processes can synchronize marine population dynamics over continental scales
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Determining the relative importance of local and regional processes for the distribution of population abundance is a fundamental but contentious issue in ecology. In marine systems, classical theory holds that the influence of demographic processes and dispersal is confined to local populations whereas the environment controls regional patterns of abundance. Here, we use spatial synchrony to compare the distribution of population abundance of the dominant mussel Mytilus californianus observed along the West Coast of the United States to that predicted by dynamical models undergoing different dispersal and environmental treatments to infer the relative influence of local and regional processes. We reveal synchronized fluctuations in the abundance of mussel populations across a whole continent despite limited larval dispersal and strong environmental forcing. We show that dispersal among neighboring populations interacts with local demographic processes to generate characteristic patterns of spatial synchrony that can govern the dynamic distribution of mussel abundance over 1,800 km of coastline. Our study emphasizes the importance of dispersal and local dynamics for the distribution of abundance at the continental scale. It further highlights potential limits to the use of "climate envelope" models for predicting the response of large-scale ecosystems to global climate change.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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".