Using regional patterns for predicting local temporal change: a test by natural experiment in the Great Lakes bioregion, Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim It has been found that species richness can be a peaked function of natural area, meaning that conversion of natural cover can increase species numbers. Here, we test whether regional richness–environment relationships can predict local change in species richness. Location The greater park ecosystem of Thousand Islands National Park ( TINP ecosystem), Ontario, Canada. Methods We evaluated change in bird richness in 85 100‐km 2 sites, censused from 1981 to 1985 and from 2001 to 2005. We related change in richness over 20 years to change in natural land cover for sites having initially less or greater than half natural area to determine whether richness changes in the direction predicted. We also assessed the extent to which local effects (site‐level extinction and colonization based on species‐specific habitat amount and neighbourhood occupancy by conspecifics) affected the predictability of species richness response to environmental change. Results Local effects predicted bird richness changes through time far better than natural area change (adjusted r 2 = 0.56 vs. adjusted r 2 = 0.13). Species richness did not consistently respond to change in natural area in the directions predicted by the broader spatial richness–environment relationship, tending to increase with decrease in natural area regardless of the initial amount of natural area. The observed natural area changes (+0.7 km 2 to −4.4 km 2 ) were small relative to the changes in richness (+60 species to −37 species), likely impacting our ability to detect a response. Main conclusions The importance of local effects observed here in determining site‐level species presence and consequently species richness has implications for species monitoring and the use of species richness as a measure of the avian response to land cover modification in Ontario. Detecting richness responses to environmental changes may often be challenged by low ‘signal‐to‐noise’ ratios and highlights the benefits of long‐term species monitoring.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".