No evidence for a positive correlation between abundance and range size in birds along a New Guinean elevational gradient
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A general pattern in biogeography is that species with high local abundances tend to have large geographic ranges, while species with low local abundances have small ranges. However, many tropical biotas do not show positive abundance–range–size correlations, potentially because eco-climatic stability in the tropics promotes specialisation or because density compensation permits some higher-elevation species to be both abundant and small-ranged. I explored these ideas by studying the abundance–range-size correlation for 37 species of small-bodied understorey New Guinean birds that live along a reef-to-ridgetop elevational gradient. Abundance (capture rates) is not related to range size (elevational breadth) in this dataset. In fact, when conducting phylogenetic regressions, abundance is significantly negatively related to range size. Because species’ abundances do not systematically vary as a function of elevational zone, this pattern is not due to density compensation. Instead, elevational specialisation appears to explain the abundance–range-size correlation, interspecific competition being an important driver of elevational specialisation. If specialised taxa are sometimes able to achieve high local abundances compared to broader-ranged taxa, specialisation may break any consistent association between abundance and range size. Further studies are necessary to test the generality of this explanation.
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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) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".