Canopy herbivory and succession in a Brazilian tropical seasonally dry forest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The general pattern of herbivory throughout succession has been drawn chiefly from temperate forest studies and mainly at the understorey. This is one of the very few studies to document canopy herbivory in relation to successional stages of tropical seasonally dry forests. Diversity of free-feeding herbivores (chewing and sap-sucking) and leaf damage caused by insect guilds (folivores, leaf miners and galling insects) were quantified in the canopy of 117 trees distributed in three areas of intermediate stages and three of late stage of succession of a tropical seasonally dry forest, in Serra do Cipo, Minas Gerais, Brazil. The richness of the chewing and sap-sucking guilds of herbivores was higher in late succession stages. The abundance of sap-sucking herbivores was also higher in the late stage, whereas chewing insects were more abundant in the intermediate succession. Overall leaf damage was higher in the earlier stage of succession. Folivory was the most frequent type of leaf damage in both succession stages and was present in 92.33% of the leaves, followed by leaf mining in 14.58% of the leaves, and galls in 5.27% of the leaves. Folivory showed no difference between successional stages, while leaf miners and gallers showed higher frequencies in the intermediate stage. These results largely corroborate the pattern earlier documented for temperate forests, of increasing diversity of herbivores and decreasing leaf damage across succession. More specific studies in tropical forests, however, did not corroborate the pattern found in temperate regions. The present study emphasises the importance of sampling across canopy of multiple plant species and analysing herbivore guilds individually for better understanding herbivory in tropical dry forests.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".