Evidence of limiting similarity revealed using a conservative assessment of coexistence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The concept of limiting similarity is important in ecology because it encapsulates the expectation under niche theory that differences among species are fundamental to coexistence. A growing body of research has tested for evidence of limiting similarity, but only a small number of studies have produced support. Here, using relevant field data, we highlight one possible explanation for the paucity of support for limiting similarity. We test whether coexisting plant species that share bees as pollinators flower asynchronously, a form of temporal niche separation consistent with limiting similarity. Our results provide evidence of limiting similarity, adding to the small collection of null modeling studies that have thus far done so. Our work also provides evidence that temporal niche variation may be an important niche axis that broadly contributes to species coexistence. Finally, we demonstrate that a more conservative assessment of coexistence that includes only individual plants that have achieved reproduction, is consequential in whether we find evidence of significant flowering asynchrony in this study. We conclude that the conservative approach to assessing coexistence that we present here can reduce noise in coexistence data, improving our power to test for evidence consistent with limiting similarity. Using this approach may or may not result in an increase in evidence supporting limiting similarity; however, it will certainly give researchers more confidence that they have not missed existing evidence of limiting similarity.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".