Bibliographic record
Abstract
Extending and integrating ecological concepts and theories can provide new solutions for difficult ecological problems. The ecosystem concept and ecosystem ecology theory have seen important developments through the elaborations of metaecosystem theory, which extends the ecosystem concept through spatial flows of energy, materials and organisms between interconnected ecosystems, and ecological stoichiometry, which extends ecological energetics by examining multiple chemical balances of substances in ecological interactions. However, these two extensions of ecosystem ecology theory have not been brought together in any form. In this thesis, I first extend both ecological stoichiometry and metaecosystem theory, and then integrate them in order to clarify difficult ecological concepts and to provide new solutions to ecological problems.My overall approach is to develop mathematical models to formally articulate ecological concepts such as nutrient colimitation, stoichiometric imbalances and metaecosystem connectivity within the frameworks of ecological stoichiometry and metaecosystem theory. First, I present a parameterized stoichiometric ecosystem model that examines the relationship between mechanisms and phenomenology of nutrient colimitation, and how the mechanisms may interact with stoichiometrically imbalanced trophic interactions. I show that there are no clear relationships between mechanisms and phenomena, and that the mechanisms of colimitation are key in determining ecological dynamics and functioning.I then examine in a spatially-explicit model how the connectivity of a metaecosystem and the relative movement rates of nutrients and organisms can drive dynamics of spatially perturbed metaecosystems. I show that the eigenvalues of the matrix that describes metaecosystem connectivity can be used to predict the spatial dynamics of a metaecosystem and the kinds of dynamics present depends heavily on relative movement rates. Lastly, I bring metaecosystem theory and ecological stoichiometry together in a spatially-explicit stoichiometric metaecosystem model to examine how spatial flows of nutrients and organisms can act as a mechanism to cause nutrient colimitation at local and regional scales. The model indicates that nutrient colimitation can be caused by spatial flows and this mechanism can be used to explain many confounding patterns in colimited growth responses found in the empirical literature.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".