Environmental DNA tracks zooplankton population dynamics in experimental mesocosms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Environmental DNA (eDNA) holds notable potential for biomonitoring and ecological research. However, its utility for quantifying temporal changes in abundance, biomass, and diversity remains contentious. We investigated biotic and abiotic factors influencing temporal variation in eDNA concentration in large, 28,000 L experimental mesocosms. Time series data demonstrated a positive relationship between the population abundance and biomass of the Cladoceran zooplankton species Daphnia magna and eDNA concentration, with a time lag of ~3.5 days in 25°C conditions, and up to 28 days in 15°C. Water temperature variations within mesocosms did not consistently influence eDNA quantity, although water temperature negatively predicted DNA concentration across mesocosms. Algal density negatively correlated with D. magna eDNA quantity across and within mesocosms. We demonstrate that eDNA signal detection can be used as a proxy for relative abundance and suggest that future investigation into the dynamics of eDNA shedding and degradation processes is warranted.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.002 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".