Topographic species–habitat associations of tree species in a heterogeneous tropical karst seasonal rain forest, China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tropical and subtropical karst forests of south China are under increasing pressure from over-exploitation causing widespread habitat degradation and biodiversity loss. Previous research has demonstrated that topography, as a proxy for resource availability, plays an important role in shaping tree species distributions in tropical forests. However, the association between growth stages and habitats types has not been considered in this analysis. Our aim was to examine the differences among different habitat types to determine whether tree species show similar species–habitat associations at young and mature life stages. We used multivariate regression tree analysis to examined species–habitat associations among eight topographically defined habitats. The results were tested with a torus-translation test and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) for 74 species in a 15 ha karst tropical seasonal rain forest at the Nonggang National Natural Reserve in south China. We considered two life stages (young and mature) of trees species that showed a positive association with topography. We found marked differences in community characteristics and number of associations among the eight habitats. Of the 74 species subjected to torus-translation test, 63 had significant positive and 70 had significant negative associations with one or more of the eight habitats. Positive associations were more frequent in higher elevation habitats and negative associations were more frequent in lower elevation habitats. This suggests that edaphic and hydrological variation related to topography play important roles in habitat partitioning in heterogeneous karst forests. For the 63 tree species with significant positive associations to at least one habitat, 40 of them had the same positive association at young and mature life stages. The CCA revealed that the six topographic variables considered had consistent relationships with species distribution among all individuals and their two life stages. This indicates that most of the karst forest tree species show consistent associations with a single habitat throughout their life. We conclude that niche differentiation plays an important role in maintaining the diversity of this heterogeneous species-rich karst forest.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".