Population-size effects on seeds and seedlings from fragmented eucalypt populations: implications for seed sourcing for ecological restoration
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ecological restoration of degraded habitats is a major conservation activity requiring the collection of large amounts of native seed. Seed production and the genetic quality of seed may be influenced by properties of the source population, such as population size and fragmentation, potentially having an impact on restoration goals. We assessed the population-size effects on seed production and seedling performance in two Western Australian wheatbelt eucalypts, Eucalyptus salmonophloia F.Muell. and E. salubris F.Muell. Both species were historically widespread and dominant, but, as a consequence of land-clearing for agriculture, now exist as small, highly fragmented populations throughout the western half of their range. Given their former importance in the landscape, these species will be critical in ecological restoration of the region. We assessed small (n = 6–12) and large (n > 200) remnant populations in a highly fragmented landscape and compared these to large unfragmented populations. Seed number per capsule was dependent on population size and fragmentation for E. salubris, but not for E. salmonophloia. Large, unfragmented populations of E. salubris produced more than twice the number of seeds per capsule (mean = 2.95) than small and/or fragmented populations. However, seed germination, seed weight, seedling survival and seedling vigour to 1 year were independent of population size or fragmentation in both species. Our results suggest that reduced population size and increased fragmentation can negatively affect pollen quantity and/or quality, thereby limiting seed production, although no fitness effects were observed post-seed maturation. We suggest that the relative absence of post-seed maturation fitness effects in these small fragmented populations are a consequence of (1) wide outcrossing resulting from long-distance dispersal of pollen by highly mobile birds among fragmented populations and/or (2) efficient pre- or post-zygotic selection against more homozygous zygotes within fruits so that only relatively outbred seeds mature. The consequences on seed collection for ecological restoration of reduced population size and increased fragmentation for these eucalypts may be fewer seeds for the same collecting effort, but no apparent fitness effects of mature seeds. However, caution should be exercised when harvesting seed from these smaller populations, as over-harvesting may have an impact on recruitment and hence long-term persistence.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 it