Peer Review #1 of "Evidence for a trophic cascade on rocky reefs following sea star mass mortality in British Columbia (v0.1)"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Echinoderm population collapses, driven by disease outbreaks and climatic events, may be important drivers of population dynamics, ecological shifts and biodiversity.The northeast Pacific recently experienced a mass mortality of sea stars.In Howe Sound, British Columbia, the sunflower star Pycnopodia helianthoides -a previously abundant predator of bottom-dwelling invertebrates -began to show signs of a wasting syndrome in early September 2013, and dense aggregations disappeared from many sites in a matter of weeks.Here, we assess changes in subtidal community composition by comparing the abundance of fish, invertebrates and macroalgae at 20 sites in Howe Sound before and after the 2013 sea star mortality to evaluate evidence for a trophic cascade.We observed changes in the abundance of several species after the sea star mortality, most notably a four-fold increase in the number of green sea urchins, Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis, and a significant decline in kelp cover, which are together consistent with a trophic cascade.Qualitative data on the abundance of sunflower stars and green urchins from a citizen science database show that the patterns of echinoderm abundance detected at our study sites reflected wider local trends.The trophic cascade evident at the scale of Howe Sound was observed at half of the study sites.It remains unclear whether the urchin response was triggered directly, via a reduction in urchin mortality, or indirectly, via a shift in urchin distribution into areas previously occupied by the predatory sea stars.Understanding the ecological implications of sudden and extreme population declines may further elucidate the role of echinoderms in temperate seas, and provide insight into the resilience of marine ecosystems to biological disturbances.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.121 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.372 | 0.156 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".