Ecotones and gradient as determinants of herpetofaunal community structure in the primary forest of Mount Kupe, Cameroon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relative effects of the elevational gradient and of environmental discontinuities (ecotones) on the structure of a herpetofaunal assemblage in a tropical upland forest were contrasted by means of canonical correspondence analysis. Qualitative descriptors were used to define the elevational positions of the ecotones of interest, namely transitions in forest type and presence/absence of water bodies. The elevational gradient was coded in a form that accommodated different types of community response. Analyses were run for four subsets of the entire assemblage: (1) reptiles, (2) amphibians, (3) amphibians dependent on streams for reproduction, and (4) amphibians that do not use streams for reproduction. All subsets showed a significant relationship with the gradient, which suggested that most species respond to the physical continuum associated with the change in elevation. A response to ecotones was revealed for the amphibian subset only and associated with the presence or absence of watercourses. However, this response disappeared within subsets 3 and 4. A variation partitioning analysis was used to assess the individual and common contributions of gradient and ecotone descriptors to the elevational variation in the structure of subsets 1 and 2. The gradient descriptors explained more variation in the reptile subset than did ecotones, while the reverse was found in the amphibian subset. The dependence of most amphibians on aquatic breeding sites that were not available at all elevations reduced the relative importance of the gradient on the species distributions in subset 2 and accounted for the difference to the reptiles. In all, these findings add to the results of previous null model tests on the same four subsets, where competitive interactions were assigned a minor importance in limiting elevational distributions. The response patterns revealed by the present approach, with ecotones and gradient contrasted in a single analysis, emphasised the role of individual responses to the gradient according to the species' physiological tolerance limits.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".