A test of desert shrub facilitation via radiotelemetric monitoring of a diurnal lizard
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Preservation of desert ecosystems is a worldwide conservation priority. Shrubs can play a key role in the structure of desert communities and can function as foundation species. Understanding desert shrub ecology is therefore an important task in desert conservation. A useful model for the function of shrubs in deserts is ecological facilitation, which explores benefits that shrubs confer on their community. Facilitation has been well developed in the context of shrub–plant interactions but less well studied for plant–animal interactions. We used radiotelemetry to test the hypothesis that a dominant desert shrub facilitates one species of diurnal lizard. We hypothesized that the blunt‐nosed leopard lizardGambelia silawould spend some part of its daily activity cycle associated with California jointfirEphedra californica, and that lizard association with shrubs would increase during the afternoon peak temperature period. We relocated lizards three times daily for 24 days and scored whether lizards were within 0.5 m of a shrub, which we used as an indicator of shrub association. For each relocation, we also scored lizard association with a set of predefined microhabitat features. We also scored lizard behavior according to a set of predefined behavioral traits. We constructed home ranges following the minimum convex polygon method and generated estimates of shrub density and relative shrub area within each home range polygon. We obtained 1,190 datapoints from a sample of 27 lizards. We found that lizards were associated with open sites significantly more often than with shrubs but were associated with shrubs more than predicted by percent shrub area within their home ranges. Lizards were associated significantly more often under shrubs during the afternoon peak temperature period, and lizards were observed cooling under shrubs significantly more often. The frequency of association of individual lizards with shrubs was not correlated with the density of shrubs within their home range.Synthesis and Applications. Shrubs can be considered as a component of high‐quality habitat for ectothermic desert vertebrates for the purposes of restoration and management. Furthermore, radiotelemetry provides a novel methodological approach for assessing shrub–animal facilitative interactions within desert communities.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".