Large herbivores favour species diversity but have mixed impacts on phylogenetic community structure in an<scp>A</scp>frican savanna ecosystem
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary There has been much debate on the impact of large herbivores on biodiversity, especially given that large mammals are becoming locally extinct in many places. The use of evolutionary information on community structure has typically been limited to evaluating assembly processes, for example, competition or habitat filtering, whereas a lack of long‐term experiments has precluded the test of predictions considering more complex biotic interactions. Reconstructing the complete phylogeny of the trees and shrubs of theKrugerNationalPark fromDNAdata, we tested for phylogenetic signal in antiherbivory traits and compared the phylogenetic structure of communities under various degrees of herbivore pressure using experimental plots spanning several decades. We show that all antiherbivory traits examined demonstrated weak but significant phylogenetic signal, and that exclusion of large herbivores results in impoverished species diversity in restructured communities. Surprisingly, we also show that reduction in species diversity coupled with community reorganization does not necessarily result in a decrease in phylogenetic diversity, and that community responses to herbivore exclusion depend on initial structure. Synthesis. Extinction of large mammal herbivores will have cascading effects on plant diversity; however, impacts on plant community structure are contingent on initial conditions. This research has implications for best practice when managing large herbivores and natural habitats.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".