Tolerance of fen mosses to submergence, and the influence on moss community composition and ecosystem resilience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Question Flood disturbance in peatlands can create temporary or permanently submerged areas where tolerant species may persist and replace intolerant species over time. Fen moss species and communities occur along a hummock–hollow gradient in natural ecosystems, but their resistance and resilience to different durations of submergence has yet to be tested. We asked what are the short‐ and long‐term effects of submergence duration on four common boreal fen moss species and the implications for ecosystem resilience? Location Rich fen near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Methods To examine the effect of submergence duration on fen moss species and communities, we harvested and submerged monoculture plugs dominated by Hamatocaulis vernicosus , Sphagnum warnstorfii, Tomentypnum nitens and Aulacomnium palustre in the field under rich fen water for 1–8 weeks. After submergence, we planted the plugs in bare peat at the same site to evaluate the short‐ and long‐term responses of each species and changes in moss community composition over time. Results We found that moss species response to duration of submergence is not strictly related to their occurrence along a hummock–hollow gradient and that tolerant species maintain or restore moss cover. H. vernicosus was most tolerant to submergence of all durations, whereas S. warnstorfii was nearly eliminated by submergence. Over the long term, more tolerant species replaced less tolerant species, increasing diversity and moss community resilience. Overall, moss communities without S. warnstorfii were resilient to 4 weeks of submergence because T. nitens and H. vernicosus maintained dominance or established where the cover of less resilient species was limited. Conclusions We show that moss species varied in their responses to submergence duration, resulting in shifts in community composition and long‐term effects on community resilience with longer durations of submergence. This provides insight into how moss communities provide stability to peatlands in response to disturbance through shifts in community composition that support tolerant dominant species.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".