Seed removal in two coexisting oak species: ecological consequences of seed size, plant cover and seed‐drop timing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seed predation and dispersal can critically influence plant community structure and dynamics. Inter‐specific differences arising at these early stages play a crucial role on tree recruitment patterns, which in turn could influence forest dynamics and species segregation in heterogeneous environments such as Mediterranean forests. We investigated removal rates from acorns set onto the ground in two coexisting Mediterranean oak species – Quercus canariensis and Q. suber – in southern Spain. We developed maximum likelihood estimators to investigate the main factors controlling probabilities of seed removal and to describe species‐specific functional responses. To account for inter‐specific differences in seed‐drop timing, two experiments were established: a simultaneous exposure of acorns of the two species (synchronous experiments) and a seed exposure following their natural seed‐drop phenology (diachronic experiments). A total of 1536 acorns were experimentally distributed along a wide and natural gradient of plant cover, and removal was periodically monitored for three months at two consecutive years (with contrasting differences in seed production and thus seed availability on the ground). The probability of seed removal increased with plant cover (leaf area index, LAI) for the two oak species. Inter‐specific differences in acorn removal were higher in open areas and disappeared in closed microhabitats, especially during a non‐mast year. Despite later seed‐drop, Q. suber acorns were removed faster and at a higher proportion than those of Q. canariensis . The higher probability of seed removal for this species could be attributed to its larger seed size compared to Q. canariensis, as inter‐specific differences were less pronounced when similar sized acorns were exposed. Inter‐specific differences in seed removal, arising from seed size variability and microsite heterogeneity, could be of paramount importance in oak species niche separation, driving stand dynamics and composition along environmental gradients.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".