Macrophyte succession in Minnesota beaver ponds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beavers (Castor canadensis Kuhl.) are keystone species that dramatically alter nutrient cycles and food webs in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems by modifying their hydrology and selectively removing riparian trees. We documented macrophyte succession in 36 beaver ponds ranging from 4 to over 40 years old. We used impounded bogs, because they were isolated from other waterbodies and less prone to washout. Richness and diversity increased linearly in ponds during the first four decades. Pond age and the product of pond size and the number of neighboring ponds in a 0.25-km radius explained 64% (p = 0.001) of the variation in richness. Compositional trends were best explained by propagule dispersal traits. Initial colonists included vagile species, like free-floating macrophytes and desirable foods for waterfowl, like the narrow-leaved pondweeds. Ponds of intermediate age (1140 years) had the highest diversity, with both floating-leaved and submersed life forms represented. Two community types were identified in older ponds: one characterized by dense lily pad cover and the other characterized by a rich assemblage of Potamogeton. By developing a predictive model for macrophyte succession in beaver ponds, we provide a basis for studying a variety of ecological processes and organisms that depend on macrophytes in these regionally abundant habitats.Key words: macrophyte, succession, beaver, bogs, Minnesota, pond.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".