Modification of plant communities by bison in Riding Mountain National Park
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plains bison (Bison bison bison) are suspected to have played an important role in maintaining and structuring the plant communities throughout the Aspen Parkland. We examine the effects of a fenced bison herd on grassland plant communities in Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba, Canada. We focus on the relationship between bison and woody plant encroachment along the forest-grassland ecotone, and on the effects that short- and long-term occupation by bison have on Festuca hallii grassland communities including the effects of bison reintroduction to a grassland area ungrazed by bison for 165 years. We found limited impacts of bison on the shrub community at the forest grassland edge. Bison rarely entered areas with dense, tall shrub understories, and thus bison cannot be a major factor controlling the ecotone. Shrub stem mortality due to fire may be a necessary precursor to bison effectively mitigating woody encroachment in the Aspen Parkland. We found limited short-term impacts of bison on grassland communities, with reduced sward heights but no change in composition. The long-term (>80 year) presence of bison was associated with greater species richness, reduced litter accumulation, and a distinct plant community composition compared to areas without bison impacts.
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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".