Functional potential of coral assemblages along a typical Eastern Tropical Pacific reef tract
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Coral reefs are considered to be valuable ecosystems due to the goods and services that they provide. However, these ecosystem services are highly dependent on the physical structure of the reef, which in turn depends on the species composition of hermatypic corals. In this study, we explored the functional potential of reefs with a new index that takes into account coral cover, the calcification rate, rugosity, and the height of each species. In June 2019, we surveyed 11 reefs from the southern Mexican Pacific (15°40′N, 96°29′W−15°45′N, 96°5′W) to estimate coral cover and collect quantitative morphometric data of ~15 haphazardly selected coral colonies per site (N = 102). We estimated the calcification rates and structural complexity of the species present and then calculated the Reef Functional Index (RFI), which estimates the species-specific functional contribution of the corals in reef systems by integrating their capacity to create complex three-dimensional structures through calcium carbonate precipitation with morphological complexity. We modelled the effects of shifting species compositions through a permutation approach with 6435 possible combinations. We found a mean coral cover of 48.5 ± 18.09% (±SD) dominated by Pocillopora damicornis, Pocillopora verrucosa, and Pocillopora capitata and low abundance of Porites panamensis and Pavona gigantea. The mean RFI was 0.71 ± 0.1. The permutation model showed that the RFI was very close to its maximum potential (96%) when the relative abundance of pocilloporids was ≥60% and decreased as the relative abundance of massive corals increased. At maximum evenness, the RFI value was at 92% of its maximum potential. Our data highlight the importance of pocilloporids to the functioning of reefs in the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP) and confirm that P. damicornis is the primary reef builder in the region. Nevertheless, our findings also highlight the vulnerability of these reefs given that branching corals are more susceptible to environmental disturbance than slow-growing massive corals. In a rapidly changing environment, the future of ETP reefs depends not only on the survival of pocilloporids but also on the ability of coral reefs to withstand highly variable oceanographic conditions as complete ecosystems.
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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) | 0.006 | 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 it