Cover type, environmental characteristics, and conservation of terrestrial gastropod diversity in boreal mixedwood forests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Terrestrial gastropods are important decomposers, herbivores, and prey items in forest systems and constitute a poorly understood element of forest biodiversity in Canada. We sampled terrestrial gastropod assemblages in northwestern Alberta, Canada, using board traps and forest floor sampling to examine their association with forest composition, structure, and environment (forest floor depth and moisture, coarse woody debris, understory vegetation cover) in four boreal mixedwood cover types: broadleaf (deciduous) dominated (DDOM), broadleaf (deciduous) dominated with coniferous understory (DDOMU), mixed conifer and broadleaf (MX), and conifer dominated (CDOM). The highest total gastropod abundance and richness occurred in the DDOM cover type. Furthermore, DDOM assemblages accumulated species more quickly (with sampling effort) and supported more gastropod species at higher levels of dominance than found in other cover types. The mix of coniferous and broadleaved trees influenced gastropod distributions within stands; however, associations observed between gastropod species and tree species differed among cover types, suggesting complex ecological contingency. For example, conifer basal area was an important driver of gastropod assemblage in DDOM and DDOMU forests, whereas broadleaf basal area was the most important driver in the CDOM forest type. We conclude that tree species mixture at a variety of scales sustains diversity of gastropod assemblages and that this understanding is significant for conservation of this taxon on mixedwood boreal forest landscapes.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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".