Metadata provide insights on patterns of epiparasitism in mistletoes (Santalales), an overlooked topic in forest biology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mistletoes are aerial-branch parasites belonging to one of five families in the Santalales. Usually, mistletoe hosts are autotrophic, but if the hosts themselves are parasitic, the plant parasitizing the host is an epiparasite. Three categories of epiparasites are recognized, chance-, obligate-, and auto-epiparasites. Loranthaceae and Viscaceae comprise about 97% of mistletoe species and also the largest number of epiparasites. We report frequencies and biogeographical distributions of epiparasite – parasite host combinations for Loranthaceae and Viscaceae, and we summarize epiparasitism in other mistletoe families. Parasitic hosts are primarily recruited from Loranthaceae, whereas most epiparasites are members of Viscaceae. Twenty-seven species are considered likely to be obligate epiparasites. Data suggest species abundance influences whether mistletoes serve as host to other mistletoes. We found no reports of epiparasitism in Misodendraceae and only a few reports for Santalaceae, although Santalaceae are often root-parasitic hosts. In Phacellaria (Amphorogynaceae) all species are obligate epiparasites, mainly on Loranthaceae. Epiparasitism occurs worldwide and is most common in the tropics and subtropics. The greatest number of reports is from Oceania, the smallest from Africa. Epiparasitism in mistletoes has received little research attention, yet our research shows that this life form contributes to species and structural diversity in forest ecosystems across the globe.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".