Could the lateral transfer of nutrients by outbreaking insects lead to consequential landscape‐scale effects?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The processes that transfer nutrients laterally over large distances are limited within terrestrial ecosystems. Here, we present the hypothesis that outbreaking insects can sometimes transport consequential amounts of embodied nutrients over long distances, thereby connecting ecological dynamics across space and leading to potential emergent effects at the landscape scale that have not been specifically addressed heretofore. Based on previously published data on insect population density, individual body mass, and nutrient content, we present initial quantitative estimates of nitrogen and phosphorus fluxes for various outbreaking insect species in different ecosystems. The results suggest that during the phases of major population change within an outbreak cycle, this process may transfer, over a given area, amounts of nutrients that exceed annual input from contemporaneous levels of atmospheric deposition, particularly for phosphorus. In addition, the relative strength of the process was likely even higher in the preindustrial era, especially for nitrogen, due to a weaker anthropogenic influence on atmospheric deposition at that time. The values we have found are comparable to the results from previous studies on 2‐D nutrient fluxes by other animals and that have been considered consequential for ecosystem processes. We further illustrate the implications of the process for the spatial distribution of nutrients and resulting ecological complexity and argue that the process is inherently scale dependent, contrary to vertical fluxes like atmospheric deposition. Moreover, we provide suggestions for future studies, both empirical and theoretical, that would better quantify the strength of the process and assess its implications. Given that the productivity of most natural terrestrial ecosystems depends primarily on locally recycled nutrients and that spatial source–sink nutrient dynamics has been shown to have important ecological consequences, the long‐distance lateral transfer of nutrients by outbreaking insects appears like a relevant landscape‐level process worthwhile of more specific attention.
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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) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".