Response of a subarctic salt marsh plant community to foraging by captive lesser snow geese
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Foraging intensity and faecal inputs are important determinants of plant community response to herbivory. We used captive adult lesser snow geese (Anser caerulescens caerulescens), which feed on both above- and below-ground plant tissues, to manipulate foraging intensity and faecal inputs to plots in a sedge meadow in spring, 1996. We measured plant and soil characteristics throughout the growing season of 1996 and in August 1997. We analysed three contrasts: grazed plots versus ungrazed controls, plots with a short period of feeding (3 goose-hours) versus plots with a long period of feeding (6 goose-hours), and grazed plots with faeces versus grazed plots without faeces. Although grazed plots had an order of magnitude higher foraging intensity than that imposed by wild geese in the marsh, there was no effect of feeding on biomass or nitrogen concentration in the dominant species, Carex ramenskii and Triglochin maritimum, after one and two growing seasons. The amount of forage removed by geese did not differ between plots grazed for long and short periods, indicating that geese were able to remove little additional biomass after 3 hours due to low availability. Therefore, the amount of biomass removed by geese was a better indicator of foraging intensity than the time geese fed on plots. The presence of faeces had no effect on biomass or nitrogen concentration in Carex ramenskii or Triglochin maritimum, or on rates of net nitrogen mineralization in soils. Thus, faeces did not appear to increase nitrogen availability for plants in this marsh, probably because faecal density was low.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".