Dispersal limits natural recruitment of African mahoganies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The abundance of forest tree species may be locally limited by the inability of species to disperse to all sites suitable for germination and establishment. This phenomenon of “dispersal limitation” has been suggested to promote the maintenance of high species diversity in tropical forests by slowing down competitive exclusion. We present the first direct experimental evaluation of dispersal limitation in tropical forests, and of its importance relative to other factors affecting recruitment. Seed addition, litter removal and light availability effects on seedling establishment were evaluated in a full factorial experiment on two African mahogany species, Entandrophragma utile and Khaya anthotheca . Seedling recruitment after 18 months, was ∼22 times greater in seed addition treatments (with addition rates corresponding to the tail of seed shadows of large reproductive trees) compared to controls. This seed addition effect was an order of magnitude greater than either gap or litter removal effects, with similar results observed in both logged and primary forest locations. We conclude that dispersal limitation strongly limits seedling establishment for the two species studied. An important “applied corollary” of this result is that seed supplementation may substantially increase local abundance of valuable or rare species in disturbed or managed tropical forests.
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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".