The importance of neutral over niche processes in structuring Ediacaran early animal communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The relative influence of niche versus neutral processes in ecosystem dynamics is a fundamental question in community ecology, but the extent to which they structured early animal communities is unknown. The oldest known metazoan-dominated paleocommunities occur in Ediacaran age (~565 million years old) strata in Newfoundland, Canada and Charnwood Forest, UK. These comprise large and diverse in-situ populations of sessile organisms that are amenable to spatial point process analyses, enabling inference of the most likely underlying niche or neutral processes governing their community structure. We conducted comprehensive spatial mapping of seven of the largest Ediacaran paleocommunities using LiDAR, photogrammetry and a laser-line probe. We find neutral processes to dominate these paleocommunities with limited influence of niche processes. Our results differ from the niche-dominated dynamics of modern marine ecosystems, revealing that the dynamics of environmental interactions prompted very different ecosystem structuring for these early animal communities.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".