Ecological history and population dynamics of a disjunct population of Brittle Prickly-pear Cactus, Opuntia fragilis (Cactaceae), in eastern Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A disjunct, rock outcrop, colony of Brittle Prickly-pear Cactus, Opuntia fragilis, in southeast Ontario was examined in 1995 to find clues to its origin, to assess its present status, and to consider the likelihood of its future persistence.The numbers, distribution, morphology and age structure of all individuals at the site were recorded and compared to a description made by others in 1967.Our initial hypothesis that this colony is relict is rejected.The colony is most likely to have resulted by human introduction as there is little evidence that it was accidentally dispersed as a burr by animals or people.Currently the colony consists of 396 plants and made up of 1683 cladodes.The population age structure shows that its numbers have been increasing steadily since 1985 when it was ravaged by cactus collectors and may have been reduced to as few as six plants.The colony is self-maintained by dispersal and establishment of separated cladodes over the rock outcrop habitat; a mechanism which may result in the establishment of new colonies elsewhere in the vicinity of Mellon Lake.The site is now protected but persistence of O. fragilis may depend on the absence of vandals and the necessity of periodic forest fires to inhibit the development of a shrub and tree community.
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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) | 0.002 | 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".