Hydrogen isotope variability in prairie wetland systems: implications for studies of migratory connectivity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hydrogen isotopes (delta2H) are often used to infer the origins of migratory animals based on the strong correlation between deuterium content of tissues and long-term patterns of precipitation. However, the extreme flood and drought dynamics of surface waters in prairie wetland systems could mask these expected correlations. We investigated H isotopic variability in an aquatic food web associated with Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) that rely heavily on wetland-derived aerial insects for food. We evaluated isotopic turnover and incorporation of environmental water into tissue, processes that could affect H isotopic composition. Wetland water and aquatic invertebrates showed intra- and interannual H isotopic variation mainly related to evaporation and the amount and timing of precipitation. Snails showed rapid turnover of tissue deuterium and a large contribution of environmental water to their tissues. Swallow feather deuterium (delta2Hf) was variable but did not clearly follow changes in any of the food web compartments measured. Instead, isotopic variability may have been driven by shifts in the type or relative amounts of grey consumed and types of wetlands used. Nevertheless, despite relatively high variance in delta2Hf, the majority of birds fell within the predicted range of delta2Hf for the study area, revealing that significant trophic averaging occurred. However, both (presumed) diet shifts and variable hydrological conditions have the potential to greatly increase variance that must be considered when assigning origins of migratory animals based on delta2H.
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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 | 0.002 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".