Separate effects of human visitation and touch on plant growth and herbivory in an old‐field community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although animal scientists have long been aware that methods used to measure an experimental system can affect the subject of measurement, similar confounding effects of commonly used field methods have only recently been acknowledged by plant ecologists. Here we demonstrate significant effects of weekly visitation (walking up to a focal plant) and handling (taking morphological measures) on plant growth and herbivory in an old-field community. Of the three species examined, Apocynum cannabinum was the most severely affected by our treatments. For Apocynum, weekly visitations resulted in a positive relationship between initial and final size, which did not occur in the unvisited plants. Visitation also increased leaf herbivory, resulting in a reduced leaf:stem biomass ratio. Handling the plants nearly doubled the proportion of individuals with a stem borer emergence hole. Growth of the other species in this study, Potentilla recta and Erigeron philadelphicus, was altered by either visitation or visitation plus handling. Visiting plants in order to observe them and touching them as one would when making morphological measurements can have important biological consequences. We suggest that plant ecologists treat repeated entry into a natural system as a research method, subject to the same scrutiny and justification as all other experimental methods.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".