Functional equivalence, competitive hierarchy and facilitation determine species coexistence in highly invaded grasslands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alien and native plant species often differ in functional traits. Trait differences could lead to niche differences that minimize competitive interactions and stabilize coexistence. However, trait differences could also translate into average fitness differences, leading to a competitive hierarchy that prevents coexistence. We tested whether trait differences between alien and native species translated into average fitness or stabilizing niche differences, and whether competition could explain observed coexistence within invaded grassland communities (New Zealand). Trait differences reflected marked competitive hierarchy, suggesting average fitness differences. Species coexistence was determined by a trade-off between species susceptibility to herbivory vs competitive hierarchy and facilitation. Importantly, although aliens and natives differed in their trait values, they did not differ in their competitive response, highlighting the importance of equalizing mechanisms in structuring invaded communities. Only a few alien species with a particular set of traits were able to jeopardize species coexistence when grazing was ceased. Our study explains why some alien species coexist with natives, whereas others have strong impacts on native communities. It highlights that trait differences can underlie several coexistence processes and that the demonstration of trait differences between aliens and natives is only a first step to understanding the role of biotic interactions in structuring invaded communities.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".