Does Predation or Moisture Explain Distance to Edge Distribution of Soil Arthropods?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ecological trap theory suggests that greater predator activity occurs along edge habitat, thereby reducing prey abundance. Alternatively, environmental gradients associated with edge habitat may be responsible for changes in prey abundance irrespective of predator spatial distribution. To test these alternative hypotheses, I measured the distance soil arthropods were to edge of boxes (21 × 9.5 cm) placed on the forest floor of prairie (precipitation-limited; 1977–1999) and boreal forest (moderate precipitation; 2000–2001) sites. Predator theory predicted that in either environment predatory groups would be located close to edge and herbivore/detritivore groups would not be distributed different from random. In support of this hypothesis, in the precipitation-limited environment 7 of 11 soil arthropod groups were distributed as predicted; however, only 7 of 13 groups followed predator predictions in the moderate-precipitation environment. In support of the environmental gradient hypothesis, 22 of 24 soil arthropod groups were distributed as predicted. Here, all hard-bodied groups, with the exception of snails, were located closer to edge than expected and all soft-bodied groups, with the exception of slugs, were not located closer to edge than expected indicating possible avoidance of external dryness. Tests of these two hypotheses were confirmed with similar results using a regression method to determine if distribution declined from edge to interior. In conclusion, the results did not support the predation hypothesis and instead supported the environmental gradient hypothesis with moisture the likely explanation for the distribution pattern of soil arthropods.
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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".