Habitat‐independent spatial structure in populations of some forest birds in eastern<scp>N</scp>orth<scp>A</scp>merica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The extent to which populations fill available ecological space is critical to evaluating niche-based theories of community assembly, but habitat suitability for populations is difficult to assess. The absence of a species from areas of otherwise suitable habitat might indicate localized species-specific influences, including biological interactions with competitors, consumers or pathogens, on local population persistence. I used Bray-Curtis ordination axis scores, based on the distributions of forest birds across census plots in eastern North America, as proxies of general features of habitat suitability to predict local abundances of each species of small land bird. I then applied spatial analysis to identify significant spatial structure (Moran's I) in residuals (positive or negative) from predicted local densities, which would indicate localized species-specific influences on population size. Fifty-eight of 79 species exhibited no significant spatial structure in residual abundances, indicating that the ordination axes reflect most of the spatial variation in environmental conditions and habitat characteristics that influence population distribution and density or that samples were too small to detect significant spatial variation. Twenty-one species exhibited significant habitat-independent spatial structure of residuals within distances of 100 km. Aggregations of residuals for these species were independently located, for the most part, and thus probably unrelated to general features of the environment that affect many species. Among factors considered as potential causes of spatial anomalies, positive density dependence (Allee effects), intraspecific social aggregation and area sensitivity in response to forest fragmentation find little support in this analysis. Because of the species-specific nature of these clustered residuals, specialized pathogens are potential candidates to drive spatial anomalies in host abundance.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".