Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of ecosystem , like many ecological concepts that have come down to us from the early developments in ecology, has a rather elusive meaning. A. G. Tansley's (1935) original definition of ecosystem states: “the more fundamental conception is ‘as it seems to me’ the whole system (in the sense of physics) including not only the organism complex but the whole complex of physical factors we call the environment of the biome—the habitat factors in the widest sense.” However, “system” is never defined or further discussed so it is unclear what Tansley and his contemporaries understood it to mean. Did he mean simply that the abiotic and biotic were to be considered together as a unit unlike the more biologically focused concepts of community and biome? Or did he mean a more process-based approach, as in the physics of coupled systems of partial differential equations (i.e., coupled processes)? If the latter, how was this to be accomplished with no governing equations, such as the Navier–Stokes equations based on the conservation of three basic qualities – mass, energy, and momentum? Whatever Tansley meant initially, the ecosystem concept was subsequently used both as a classification of communities, biomes, and their habitat in terms of environmental factors and as nutrient cycles and energy flows through food webs (McIntosh, 1985). Thus, we are left with an incomplete understanding of how the environment is to be connected as a “system” to organisms, populations, communities, and ecosystems. Recent decades have seen several advances that are contributing to the beginning of this synthesis (e.g., Nealson and Ghiorse, 2001; Hedin et al ., 2002). One of the most interesting developments in ecology has been the Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE). This theory (West et al ., 1997; 1999; Brown et al ., 2004; Enquist et al ., 2003; 2007) argues that mass conservation, biological mechanics, hydraulics, heat budgets, and thermodynamics can be used to explain the flux of energy, water, and nutrients from cells to ecosystems. This, in turn, explains the empirical scaling evidence for B = B o M 3/4 where B is an organism's metabolic rate, B o is a normalization constant independent of an organism's mass, and M is an organism's mass (West et al ., 1997).
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.417 | 0.251 |
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".