Evaluating restoration trajectories using DNA metabarcoding of invertebrates and their associated plant communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Invertebrate communities provide many critical ecosystem functions (e.g. pollination, decomposition, herbivory and soil formation), and have been identified as indicators of ecological restoration. Unfortunately, invertebrates are often overlooked in restoration monitoring because they are time-consuming to survey, often require rare taxonomic expertise, and there are many undescribed species. DNA metabarcoding is a tool to rapidly survey invertebrates and can also provide information about plants with which those invertebrates are interacting. Here we evaluate how invertebrate communities may be used to determine ecosystem trajectories during restoration. We collected ground-dwelling and airborne invertebrates across chronosequences of mine-site restoration in three ecologically different locations in Western Australia, and identified invertebrate and plant communities using DNA metabarcoding. Ground-dwelling invertebrates showed the clearest restoration signals, with communities becoming more similar to reference communities over time. These patterns were weaker in airborne invertebrates, which have higher dispersal abilities and therefore less local fidelity to environmental conditions. Invertebrate community recovery was most evident in ecosystems with relatively stable climax communities, while the trajectory in the Pilbara, with its harsh climate and unpredictable monsoonal flooding, was unclear. Plant assay results indicate invertebrates are foraging locally, providing data about interactions between invertebrates and their environment. Thus, we show how DNA metabarcoding of invertebrate communities can be used to evaluate likely trajectories for restoration. Testing and incorporating new monitoring techniques such as DNA metabarcoding is critical to improving restoration outcomes, and is now particularly salient given the ambitious global restoration targets associated with the UN decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".