Habitat amelioration and associational defence as main facilitative mechanisms in Mediterranean grasslands grazed by domestic livestock
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Facilitative interactions alter species dynamics through the mechanisms of habitat amelioration, associational defence against herbivores, and release of competitive interactions. However, the relative importance of each mechanism remains poorly known. This study attempts to fill that gap for systems grazed by domestic livestock, where abiotic stress, grazing, and competition potentially limit plant performance. In southern France, two light-demanding trees, Pinus sylvestris and Pinus nigra, invade grasslands and often become established near shrubs. We tested the effects of habitat amelioration, associational defence against herbivores and release of herb competition by shrubs on the establishment of pine seedlings by sowing and transplantation experiments. We also assessed the effect of shrubs on seed predation and sapling growth. Shrubs increased seed predation and depressed seedling emergence and sapling growth, but they facilitated the survival of pine seedlings by increasing shade and soil moisture and by protecting seedlings against sheep grazing. There was no effect of herb competitive release. This study points out that habitat amelioration and associational defence are both highly important in dry grasslands grazed by domestic livestock because these mechanisms enhance seedling survival, a major life stage for tree dynamics. This situation, in which two facilitative mechanisms are important, is not taken into account by current models of facilitation and is probably due to the coupling of domestic herbivore grazing and stressful abiotic conditions.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".