Estimating partial regulation in spatiotemporal models of community dynamics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Niche-based approaches to community analysis often involve estimating a matrix of pairwise interactions among species (the "community matrix"), but this task becomes infeasible using observational data as the number of modeled species increases. As an alternative, neutral theories achieve parsimony by assuming that species within a trophic level are exchangeable, but generally cannot incorporate stabilizing interactions even when they are evident in field data. Finally, both regulated (niche) and unregulated (neutral) approaches have rarely been fitted directly to survey data using spatiotemporal statistical methods. We therefore propose a spatiotemporal and model-based approach to estimate community dynamics that are partially regulated. Specifically, we start with a neutral spatiotemporal model where all species follow ecological drift, which precludes estimating pairwise interactions. We then add regulatory relations until model selection favors stopping, where the "rank" of the interaction matrix may range from zero to the number of species. A simulation experiment shows that model selection can accurately identify the rank of the interaction matrix, and that the identified spatiotemporal model can estimate the magnitude of species interactions. A 40-yr case study for the Gulf of St. Lawrence marine community shows that recovering grey seals have an unregulated and negative relationship with demersal fishes. We therefore conclude that partial regulation is a plausible approximation to community dynamics using field data and hypothesize that estimating partial regulation will be expedient in future analyses of spatiotemporal community dynamics given limited field data. We conclude by recommending ongoing research to add explicit models for movement, so that meta-community theory can be confronted with data in a spatiotemporal statistical framework.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".