Sinks for plant surplus carbon explain several ecological phenomena
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Plants engage in many processes and relationships that appear to be wasteful of the high-energy compounds that they produce through carbon fixation and photosynthesis. For example, living trees keep leafless tree stumps alive ( i.e. respiring) and support shaded understory trees by sharing carbohydrates through root grafts or mycorrhizal fungal networks. Plants exude a diverse array of organic compounds from their roots and leaves, which support abundant rhizosphere and phyllosphere microbiomes. Some plants release substantial amounts of sugar via extra-floral nectaries, which enrich throughfall and alter lichen communities beneath the canopy. Large amounts of photosynthetically fixed carbon are transferred to root associates such as mycorrhizal fungi and N-fixing micro-organisms. Plants also respire fixed C through an alternative pathway that does not generate ATP. Rates of each of these processes appear to be highest when plants are growing under mild-to-moderate deficiencies of nutrients or water. During this stage of deficiency, aboveground plant growth is curtailed more than photosynthesis, causing leaves to produce surplus carbohydrates. Each of the above phenomena provide a sink for these surplus carbohydrates, thereby preventing feedback inhibition of photosynthesis, and perpetuating the influx of C. Because these processes incur little cost to the source plant, they need not provide a benefit beyond the removal of surplus carbohydrates.
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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".