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Record W2136370315 · doi:10.1890/08-2207.1

Complexity in quantitative food webs

2009· article· en· W2136370315 on OpenAlex

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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueEcology · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicSustainability and Ecological Systems Analysis
Canadian institutionsOntario Tech University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsFood webTrophic levelEcologyStability (learning theory)Diversity (politics)BiologyComputer scienceMachine learningSociology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Food webs depict who eats whom in communities. Ecologists have examined statistical metrics and other properties of food webs, but mainly due to the uneven quality of the data, the results have proved controversial. The qualitative data on which those efforts rested treat trophic interactions as present or absent and disregard potentially huge variation in their magnitude, an approach similar to analyzing traffic without differentiating between highways and side roads. More appropriate data are now available and were used here to analyze the relationship between trophic complexity and diversity in 59 quantitative food webs from seven studies (14-202 species) based on recently developed quantitative descriptors. Our results shed new light on food-web structure. First, webs are much simpler when considered quantitatively, and link density exhibits scale invariance or weak dependence on food-web size. Second, the "constant connectance" hypothesis is not supported: connectance decreases with web size in both qualitative and quantitative data. Complexity has occupied a central role in the discussion of food-web stability, and we explore the implications for this debate. Our findings indicate that larger webs are more richly endowed with the weak trophic interactions that recent theories show to be responsible for food-web stability.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.036
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.045
GPT teacher head0.281
Teacher spread0.235 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it