Elevational patterns of bird functional and phylogenetic structure in the central Himalaya
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How communities assemble is a central and fundamental question in ecology. However, it has been mired by conflicting conclusions about whether community assembly is driven by environmental filtering, biotic interactions, and/or dispersal processes. Elevational gradients provide an ideal system for exploring the biotic and abiotic forces influencing the processes of community assembly, as these both change dramatically on mountains over short spatial distances. Here, we explored bird taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity, and assessed the role of spatial (area) and environmental factors (temperature, precipitation, plant richness, habitat heterogeneity, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)) in shaping bird distributions and community structure along a 3600 m elevational gradient in the central Himalayas, China. Our results showed that the three dimensions of diversity consistently showed hump‐shaped patterns with similar peaks. Richness‐controlled functional diversity decreased with elevation, while richness‐controlled phylogenetic diversity showed a Mid Valley pattern. Mean pairwise functional distance decreased linearly with elevation, and mean pairwise phylogenetic distance was nearly constant along the elevation gradient but increased rapidly at higher elevations (above 3900–4200 m a.s.l). The functional structure of bird communities was more clustered relative to source pools (i.e. species more similar to one another) across the elevation gradient, suggesting abiotic or habitat filtering likely governed the assembly processes. However, phylogenetic structure was more clustered relative to source pools at mid‐elevations and more overdispersed (i.e. species are less related) at low and high elevations. In addition, primary productivity (NDVI and/or habitat heterogeneity and/or plant richness) was a good predictor of variation for most diversity metrics. Taken together, our study demonstrated contrasting elevational patterns assessed from functional and phylogenetic measures and highlighted the necessity of considering multiple measures of biodiversity when assessing community structure.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".