Contributions of gopher mound and casting disturbances to plant community structure in a Cascade Range meadow complex
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pocket gophers (Geomyidae) are major agents of disturbance in North American grasslands. Gopher mounds bury existing plants and influence community structure through various mechanisms. However, in mountain meadows that experience winter snowpack, gophers also create winter castings, smaller tube-shaped deposits, previously ignored in studies of plant–gopher disturbance relationships. We studied the influences of the Mazama pocket gopher (Thomomys mazama Merriam, 1897) in montane meadows of the Oregon Cascades, quantifying community patterns at larger spatial scales than previously studied in this system and considering, for the first time, effects of both mounds and castings. We measured cover of disturbance and individual plant species along twenty 5 m transects in each of four plots with differing species composition. Total plant cover was negatively correlated with mounds and castings. However, only mounds influenced growth-form dominance, reducing graminoid cover and increasing the forb–graminoid ratio — effects attributable to the greater volume and longevity of mounds. Forb-disturbance relationships were variable among plots, likely due to differences in species’ tolerance of burial. Transect-scale richness and heterogeneity (variation in composition within transects) increased with disturbance. We conclude that frequent, small-scale disturbances create a shifting mosaic of vegetation states, reducing graminoid dominance and enhancing species richness and heterogeneity at larger spatial scales.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".