A synthesis of tissue-preservation effects on carbon and nitrogen stable isotope signatures
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
Stable-isotope analysis is a powerful method for characterizing flows of mass and energy through ecosystems. Long-term food-web studies using stable isotopes are valuable but rare because the required samples are not readily available. We examine the feasibility of using preserved specimens from natural-history collections as a source of long-term data for food-web studies and test whether chemical preservation affects the stable-isotope signature of tissues. We experimentally determined the effects of tissue preservation and fixation with 75% ethanol and 10% formalin, respectively, on δ 13 C and δ 15 N of three aquatic consumers: Sacramento sucker, Catostomus occidentalis, Asian clam, Corbicula fluminea, and a caddisfly, Hydropsyche sp. Using both our results and previously published literature results, we characterize preservation effects across many different consumer taxa including invertebrates, fish, and birds. Overall, only formalin fixation systematically affected isotope signature, causing an average depletion of 1.65 in δ 13 C, a bias that can easily be corrected for prior to interpreting data. Preservation affected mean δ 15 N values with far lower frequency and magnitude, although variability increased with preservation for some taxa but not others. These findings suggest that preserved specimens may be used for stable-isotope analysis and open up the possibility of using archived collections to reconstruct food webs and biogeochemical changes at scales of tens to hundreds of years.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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