Ecological dynamic regimes: Identification, characterization, and comparison
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Understanding ecological dynamics has been a central topic in ecology since its origins. Yet, identifying dynamic regimes remains a research frontier for modern ecology. The concept of ecological dynamic regime (EDR) emerged to emphasize the dynamic property of steady states in nature and refers to the fluctuations of ecosystems around some trend or average. Identifying and characterizing EDRs is of utmost importance in the current context of global change since they form the reference against which post‐disturbance dynamics must be compared to assess ecological resilience. However, the implementation of EDRs in empirical science is still challenging given the high dimensionality and stochasticity of ecological data and the large volume of data required to distinguish stochastic dynamics from general and predictable dynamics. The era of big data and the recent advances in quantitative ecology and data science offer an opportunity to study dynamic regimes using empirical approaches from a new perspective. This paper presents a novel methodological framework to describe EDRs from a set of ecological trajectories defined by the temporal changes of state variables in a multidimensional state space. In our framework, we formally define EDRs and include analytical tools to identify, characterize, and compare EDRs based on their geometric characteristics. More specifically, we propose different ways to identify EDRs from empirical data, develop a new algorithm to identify representative trajectories summarizing the main dynamic patterns, propose a set of metrics to describe the internal distribution of ecological trajectories, and define a dissimilarity index to compare two or more dynamic regimes based on their shape and position in the state space. We used artificial data to illustrate the different elements of our framework and applied our analyses to real data, using permanent sampling plots of Canadian boreal forests as an example. Overall, our framework contributes to filling the gap between theoretical and empirical ecology by providing robust analytical tools to assess ecological resilience and study ecosystem dynamics from a multidimensional perspective and considering the variability of natural systems.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".