Ecosystem structure and function of afrotropical streams with contrasting land use
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Land use changes can strongly influence stream ecosystems, yet these effects remain poorly documented in many hotspots of deforestation such as tropical Africa. The few studies conducted in this region have mostly focused on structural aspects of stream integrity; sparse data are available for key ecosystem processes such as ecosystem metabolism and litter decomposition. To address this knowledge gap, we measured multiple ecosystem functions in rainforest and nearby agricultural (farm) streams located in an afrotropical deforestation hotspot. In two farm and forest stream pairs, we quantified the standing stock biomass of basal resources and invertebrate functional feeding groups, measured rates of litter decomposition (microbial and shredder‐mediated) and modelled invertebrate secondary production. We also calculated whole‐stream metabolic parameters over multiple weeks. To test the regional generality of our results, we then reanalysed a published dataset and assessed the functional composition of invertebrate communities from many local streams. We found that farm streams had greater algal standing stocks, gross primary production ( GPP ) and production‐to‐respiration ratios than forest streams, although they remained strongly heterotrophic with relatively low GPP values. Agricultural land use also led to the almost complete extirpation of invertebrate shredders, resulting in much slower litter decomposition rates at farm than forest sites despite comparable rates of microbial decomposition. Finally, farm streams had lower invertebrate biomass despite abundant basal resources, leading to a 41%–66% reduction in estimated invertebrate production. We speculate that the functional response of our streams to agricultural land use (i.e., a modest increase in GPP but large declines in invertebrate production and shredder‐mediated litter decomposition rates) could be common across the afrotropics due to low fertiliser usage in this region and/or features of the local fauna. Although our study focuses a small number of streams, the large effect sizes that we report suggest that afrotropical streams could be strongly affected by rapid land use changes in the region, highlighting the need for additional research, monitoring, and conservation efforts in this poorly studied area of the world that is under increasing human pressures.
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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) | 0.002 | 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".