The ecological relationships and demography of restricted ironstone endemic plant species: implications for conservation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigated the ecological relationships, reproductive biology and demography of four shrub taxa restricted to ironstone ranges in south-western Australia, to assess the feasibility of post-mining reintroductions. We found that three taxa were restricted to narrow fissures in massive ironstone and the fourth was restricted to fissures and skeletal soils over ironstone. In all taxa, adult plants were the most abundant life stage in populations and produced seeds annually. Newly emerged seedlings were observed in low numbers each winter of three census years, with the highest rates occurring when winter rainfall was above average in the semiarid Mediterranean climate. Mortality was highest and most variable for <1-year-old seedlings (50–93%), 1-year-old seedlings (17–67%), juveniles (21–54%) and vegetative adults (6–50%), and was lowest and least variable for the reproductive adults (2–7%). The restriction of three of our study taxa to narrow fissures excludes the option of using seedlings in reintroductions. Using seeds, although possible, will be both an inefficient and a high-risk strategy for at least three of the four taxa studied. This is because of the low frequency of years when winter rainfall is sufficient to stimulate high rates of seed germination, coupled with the consistently high rates of seedling mortality in most years, and no easy method for determining which rock fissures will be suitable for plant establishment. The more widespread taxa showed reproductive and demographic characteristics similar to those of the taxa restricted to the narrow fissures, indicating that establishment of many species will be difficult in this environment.
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 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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".