Indirect interactions in terrestrial plant communities: emerging patterns and research gaps
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indirect interactions occur when the effect of one species on another is mediated by a third species. These interactions occur in most multi‐species assemblages and are diverse in their mechanistic pathways. The interest in indirect interactions has increased exponentially over the past three decades, in recognition of their importance in determining plant community dynamics and promoting species coexistence. Here, we review the literature on indirect interactions among plants published since 1990, using a novel synthetic framework that accounts for and classifies intervening species and mechanisms within trophic networks. The objectives of this review are: (1) to identify the geographical regions and ecosystem types where indirect interactions have been examined; (2) to summarize the information on the number of trophic levels examined in studies of indirect interactions; (3) to test whether the frequency of indirect interactions varies across environmental gradients; and (4) to identify the experimental approaches most commonly used in studies of indirect interactions. Studies examining indirect interactions in plants have been conducted primarily in the Northern Hemisphere, with a focus on grasslands and forests. The majority of studies (67%) examined two trophic levels. Indirect facilitation and apparent competition are the interactions that have been most frequently examined, with the latter being reported more frequently in relatively productive environments. Other indirect interactions reported include associational resistance, exploitative competition or facilitation, shared defenses, and trophic cascades. Generally, field experiments tested indirect interactions based on single target species. While the majority of studies on indirect interactions dealt with basic ecology issues, several studies have dealt with such interactions in the context of biological invasions (18%) and rangeland management (12%). This review allowed us identifying a number of research needs, including the study of non‐feeding interactions and that for more realistic complex designs, explicitly testing indirect interactions across different trophic levels, in geographical regions that have been under‐examined to date, and in stressful ecosystems.
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.
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 it