The Birds and The Bees and The Willows: Understanding the reproductive biology of Salix nigra Marsh.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Salix nigra is a common tree-form willow found throughout the eastern United States and Canada in riparian and wetland habitats. Like other members of the Salicaceae, it is dioecious with separate male and female individuals. While Salix has been thought to be strictly insect pollinated and Populus wind pollinated, several species of Salix have had wind pollination present in varying amounts by species. S. nigra’s pollination syndrome has not been studied extensively, though it is assumed to be insect pollinated. Unlike other willows with wind pollination, S. nigra is basal on the Salix phylogenetic tree. This study was conducted in a fragmented riparian forest in West Virginia University’s Core Arboretum. Other aspects of S. nigra reproductive biology were also studied, such as pollen: ovule ratio and pollen limitation. Pollen: ovule ratio can be indicative of pollination syndrome, and pollen limitation can vary based on pollination syndrome as well but can also be used to explain if dioecy can be maintained. Our research determined that S. nigra is likely insect pollinated by using pollinator exclusion bags on flowering catkins. A low pollen:ovule ratio of 260 also gives evidence for insect pollination. Pollen limitation was not found during this study, indicating the efficiency of pollinators in this population and a lack of pressure to change from a dioecious state. In addition, gene flow and factors influencing male reproductive success were measured to help explain how and why S. nigra is pollinated and which individuals produce offspring through a paternity analysis. Pollination within the population was influenced by distance between mother and father trees with other measured factors not having a significant differences when comparing all offspring and potential fathers within the defined population. Assigned paternities ranged up to 510 meters away from a mother tree and 12% of resulting offspring were due to gene flow from unidentified fathers outside of the sampled population. S. nigra pollinators are therefore capable of traveling great distances and linking together fragmented populations of S. nigra. Additional studies are needed to understand S. nigra pollinator foraging behaviors and its potential impacts on pollination and gene flow.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".