Large-scale spatial synchrony and the stability of forest biodiversity revisited
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AimsMechanisms contributing to species coexistence have at least one of two modes of action: (i) stabilization of populations through restoring forces and (ii) equalization of fitness across individuals of different species. Recently, ecologists have begun gleaning the relative roles of these by testing the predictions of neutral theory, which predicts the properties of communities under pure fitness equalization. This null hypothesis was rejected for forests of southern Ontario based on large-scale (∼100 km) spatial synchrony evident in the fossil pollen record over the entire Holocene, and the argument that a species' relative abundance would instead vary independently at such distances in the absence of stabilizing mechanisms. This test of neutral theory was criticized based on the idea that the synchrony might be produced by dispersal alone. Here, I revisit this test of neutral theory by explicitly calculating the synchrony expected in these forests using a novel simulation method enabling examination of the distribution of a species over large spatial and temporal 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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".