Joint effects of patch edges and habitat degradation on faunal predation risk in a widespread marine foundation species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human activities degrade and fragment coastal marine habitats, reducing their structural complexity and making habitat edges a prevalent seascape feature. Though habitat edges frequently are implicated in reduced faunal survival and biodiversity, results of experiments on edge effects have been inconsistent, calling for a mechanistic approach to the study of edges that explicitly includes indirect and interactive effects of habitat alteration at multiple scales across biogeographic gradients. We used an experimental network spanning 17 eelgrass (Zostera marina) sites across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Mediterranean Sea to determine (1) if eelgrass edges consistently increase faunal predation risk, (2) whether edge effects on predation risk are altered by habitat degradation (shoot thinning), and (3) whether variation in the strength of edge effects among sites can be explained by biogeographical variability in covarying eelgrass habitat features. Contrary to expectations, at most sites, predation risk for tethered crustaceans (crabs or shrimps) was lower along patch edges than in patch interiors, regardless of the extent of habitat degradation. However, the extent to which edges reduced predation risk, compared to the patch interior, was correlated with the extent to which edges supported higher eelgrass structural complexity and prey biomass compared to patch interiors. This suggests an indirect component to edge effects in which the impact of edge proximity on predation risk is mediated by the effect of edges on other key biotic factors. Our results suggest that studies on edge effects should consider structural characteristics of patch edges, which may vary geographically, and multiple ways that humans degrade habitats.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".