Pumas <i>Puma concolor</i> as ecological brokers: a review of their biotic relationships
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The puma Puma concolor is the fourth largest wild felid and the most widespread native terrestrial mammal of the Americas. We synthesised published literature documenting the biotic interactions of pumas, in order to: 1) advance our understanding of the ecological roles pumas play in natural systems, and 2) support strategic decision‐making about conservation investments, public education, and whole‐ecosystem conservation management. We divided puma biotic interactions into five categories: 1) diet and prey regulation, 2) fear effects on prey (including trophic cascades), 3) effects via carrion production, 4) effects on other carnivores, and 5) ecosystem services. We reviewed 162 studies that met our search criteria, which described 543 ecological interactions between pumas and 485 other species. Puma diet and prey regulation was the most common research topic. The geographic distribution of research was highly skewed towards the USA and Canada, and research in Tropical moist forests was underrepresented. We found a steep increase in the number of scientific publications exploring the biotic interactions associated with pumas over time, but publications that reported effect sizes or measured the strength of interactions did not increase as quickly. We noted numerous gaps in our knowledge of puma biotic interactions and found few well‐controlled studies of prey fear effects, trophic cascades, or ecosystem services. We conclude that pumas are influential ecological actors in natural systems and important brokers of energy and nutrients throughout ecosystems in the Western Hemisphere, linking disparate species from many trophic levels. Ultimately, we found evidence for investing in and prioritising the protection and restoration of puma populations to conserve biodiversity in the Americas.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.062 | 0.003 |
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 it