Climatic effects on caterpillar fluctuations in northern hardwood forests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fluctuations in the abundance of Lepidoptera are common but inadequately understood. Here we show that caterpillar abundance in the White Mountains of New Hampshire has fluctuated by >20-fold from 1986 to 2005. We report tests of three possible causes: (i) extreme winter cold; (ii) long, warm summers; and (iii) interannual variation in tree growth, which tends to correlate with phytochemistry. Caterpillar fluctuations from summers t to t + 1 were uncorrelated or negatively correlated with minimum air temperature during the intervening winter (does not support the first cause), but were positively correlated with thermal sum during summer t (r = 0.49–0.56) (supports the second cause). There was limited interannual variation in the radial growth of two dominant tree species ( Acer saccharum Marsh. and Betula alleghaniensis Britt.) and no correlation with caterpillar fluctuations (refutes the third cause). Thermal sum might influence caterpillar fluctuations through direct effects on insect development, indirect effects on susceptibility to natural enemies, and (or) indirect effects on plant-insect interactions; the mechanisms are of particular interest because thermal sums have been increasing since local records began in 1957 (r = 0.41–0.45). In hardwoods forests of the northeastern United States, there is some broad-scale driver related to summer temperatures that generates fluctuations in caterpillar abundance, which influences herbivory as well as higher level consumers, such as insectivorous birds.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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".