Intraspecific variation in nutritional traits of neighbouring plants generates a continuum of associational effects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aims When deciding whether or not to eat a plant, herbivores are influenced by the nutritional value of potential foods, but also indirectly by neighbouring plants (associational effects). We aimed to investigate how the abundance and nutritional quality of neighbours of balsam firs ( Abies balsamea ) affects browsing on balsam firs by white‐tailed deer. We sought to distinguish the effects of conspecific and heterospecific neighbour abundance, and to evaluate whether intraspecific variation in nutritional traits produces associational effects. Location Anticosti Island, QC, Canada. Methods We measured the abundance of stems in 4‐m 2 plots centred on a focal balsam fir and evaluated nutritional value (nitrogen content and digestibility) of focal firs and neighbouring plants. We used generalized linear models to explain browsing on firs as a function of the neighbouring stem abundance (conspecific and heterospecific), and of the nutritional value of firs and neighbouring stems. Results Fir abundance only affected browsing of firs after accounting for fir nutritional value, e.g., browsing in plots of low fir digestibility decreased as the number of fir stems increased (resource dilution effect). The associational effects of heterospecific neighbour abundance, especially birch stem and shoot abundance, were also contingent on neighbour nutritional value. For example, at low birch digestibility, browsing on the focal fir increased with the number of neighbouring birches. Browsing on fir also increased as the number of spruce stems of high nutritional value increased. Conclusions By taking into account the abundance of all species, we could discriminate between conspecific effects and associational effects caused by heterospecifics. Our study suggests that the strength of associational effects varies in a continuous fashion in response to relative nutritional value. We propose that future studies should not only consider the identity of neighbours but also the nutritional traits of plant communities.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".