Frozen out: unanswered questions about winter biology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Winter conditions impose dramatic constraints on temperate, boreal, and polar ecosystems, and shape the abiotic and biotic interactions underpinning these systems. At high latitudes, winter can last longer than the growing season and may have a disproportionately large impact on organisms and ecosystems. Even so, our understanding of the ecological implications of winter is often lacking. Indeed, even what exactly defines winter is currently unclear, and boundaries that delineate this season are blurred across marine, freshwater, and terrestrial realms and fields of biology. Here, we discuss the complexity of defining winter, and highlight the importance of maintaining the capacity to test hypotheses across seasons, realms, and domains of life. We then outline questions drawn from diverse fields of research that address current gaps in our understanding of winter ecology and how winter influences multiple levels of biological organization, from individuals to ecosystems. Finally, we highlight the potential consequences of changes to both the length and severity of winter due to climate change, and discuss the role winter may play in mediating ecosystem function in the future.
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 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) | 0.255 | 0.047 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".