Patterns and mechanisms underlying ecoregion delineation in North American freshwater plants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim The regionalized patterns of biodiversity distributions are actively studied in terrestrial and marine ecosystems, but much less is known on the geographical patterns of ecoregions founded on freshwater taxa. Here, we studied, for the first time, how well existing freshwater ecoregions describe the geographical distribution of inland water plants. Location Greenland, continental Canada and USA. Taxon Freshwater vascular plants of all taxa and multiple functional groups (i.e. growth forms). Methods Using newly available fine‐grained data on freshwater plant distributions, we studied how ecoregions founded on fish are suitable for freshwater plant regionalization across North America. Specifically, we calculated internal homogeneity and distinctness among neighbouring ecoregions in relation to species replacements and richness differences. We also explored how a complex suite of ecogeographical characteristics affect ecoregion delineation of freshwater plants using spatially explicit regression routines. Results We found a clear geographical patterning of ecoregion robustness for North American freshwater plants, with communities being more internally homogeneous and more similar to one another in Polar and Subtropical inland waters. The degree of internal homogeneity and ecoregion distinctness were almost equally driven by species replacements and richness differences. Considering different life‐forms, ecoregion delineation performed best for emergent and floating‐leaved plants. Finally, within‐ecoregion homogeneity and distinctness were best explained by annual mean temperature and terrain ruggedness, respectively, with mean water alkalinity, ecoregion area and late Quaternary glacial legacies having supplementary effects. Main conclusions Our findings suggest that selection through climate filtering (e.g. mean annual temperature) is likely the main mechanistic driver of freshwater plant ecoregions. Geographical regionalizations founded on a particular organismal group may not be directly applicable for all taxa but can be a good basis for further adjustments. Our study is a promising starting point for further investigations of geographical delineations for freshwater taxa other than fish.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 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".