Skipped reproductive cycles and extensive sporophyte abortion in the desert moss <i>Tortula inermis</i> correspond to unusual rainfall patterns
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A phenological assessment of Tortula inermis (Brid.) Mont. populations in the Mojave Desert, Nevada, U.S.A., over a period of 4 years revealed that the sporophyte cohort initiated in early 1995 remained dormant until early 1998, by which time approximately 66% of the sporophytes had aborted. The viable sporophytes of this cohort were significantly shorter in length and had significantly less biomass than the previous cohort of sporophytes. In the intervening years 1996 and 1997, the sexual reproductive cycle was skipped altogether. The absence of sporophyte initiation in these two years was attributed to reduced winterspring rainfall. The majority of abortive sporophytes aborted in the late embryonic and seta elongation phenophases. The 1997 and 1998 summers were characterized by unusually heavy rains. Following the heavy summer rain events of 1997, sporophyte abortion in the 1995 cohort increased from 9 to 43%, and abortive sporophytes in this cohort further increased to 66% following the summer rains of 1998. Abortive sporophyte biomass averaged 49 µg or 33% of the mean biomass of the viable sporophytes in the cohort at maturity. These data suggest that the summer rain events precipitated two waves of sporophyte abortion, possibly through heavy membrane damage associated with rapid drying and high temperatures while hydrated.Key words: sporophyte abortion, bryophyte, desert, Tortula, desiccation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.000 | 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".