Interactive effects of insects and ungulates on root growth in a native grassland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Insects and ungulates co‐occur in grasslands, often feeding on the same plants at the same time and potentially having interactive effects on plant growth. Further, ungulate–insect interactions may differ between native ungulate guilds and domesticated cattle. Despite the prevalence of insects and ungulates in native grasslands, experiments simultaneously manipulating the densities of both these groups are rare. Using large, replicated paddocks, as well as insecticide application, we restricted access to vegetation by each group of herbivores. We also manipulated the species identity of the ungulate assemblage, allowing us to determine whether there are differential effects between native ungulate guilds (bison, elk and deer) and cattle on plant biomass. We found interactive effects of insect and ungulate herbivores on root growth. When insects were suppressed, both native ungulates and cattle caused an approximate doubling of root biomass. However, this stimulatory effect of ungulate grazing was eliminated when insects were also present. In contrast, neither insects nor ungulates had significant effects on shoot biomass at these densities. As a result, the dominant effects of above‐ground herbivory was on belowground plant growth. We suggest the effects of insect and ungulate assemblages on root biomass appear important in regulating primary production in this grassland and may account for some of the contradictory plant responses to ungulate herbivory in the literature.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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".