A single range‐expanding species reshapes alpine ecosystems and their belowground diversity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Species around the globe are shifting their ranges into new territories at an unprecedented rate. In particular, the spread of foundation species can transform recipient communities and ecosystems, however, the effects on belowground processes and diversity remain poorly documented. Belowground fungi are well suited for taking the ‘pulse' of changing ecosystems given their rapid turnover and implication in a wide variety of ecosystem processes. To better understand the belowground effects of range‐expanding species, we leveraged an ongoing invasion of a foundation tree species Pinus contorta into alpine tundra to study the impacts on belowground abiotic conditions and the fungal communities associating with the roots of resident plants. We found that individual range‐expanding trees create distinct abiotic ‘islands' with wetter soils and altered soil nutrients compared to the surrounding alpine tundra ecosystem. Potentially driven by these abiotic changes, we observed a decrease in the α diversity of mutualistic fungi and an increase in the α‐diversity of pathogenic fungi during later stages of range expansion. Changes in γ‐diversity mirrored patterns of α diversity while β‐diversity was only minorly affected by range‐expanding trees, suggesting that local habitat amelioration/deterioration rather than changes in among‐patch heterogeneity underpin trends in belowground diversity. In sum, our results show that range‐expanding foundation species can modify ecosystems by altering belowground abiotic conditions and diversity across scales. These impacts begin only a few years after initial range‐expansion and establishment and scale rapidly over time, indicating the need for preventative or swift conservation action to prevent long‐term consequences.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".