Spatially explicit predictions of food web structure from regional level data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Knowledge about how ecological networks vary across global scales is currently limited given the complexity of acquiring repeated data for species interactions. Yet, recent developments of metawebs highlight efficient ways to first document possible interactions within regional species pools. Downscaling metawebs towards local network predictions is a promising approach to use current data to investigate the variation of networks across space. However, issues remain in how to represent the spatial variability and uncertainty of species interactions, especially for large scale food webs. Here, we present a probabilistic framework to downscale a metaweb based on the Canadian mammal metaweb and species occurrences from GBIF. We investigate how our approach can be used to represent the variability of networks and communities between ecoregions in Canada. Our results highlighted mismatches in the distribution of species richness and interactions, especially in their within-ecoregion variability, indicating that interactions vary differently than species distributions over continental-scale gradients. Results summarized by ecoregion showed non-constant variation within and between ecologically meaningful biogeographic boundaries and identified contrasting diversity hotspots. Our method offers the potential to bring global predictions down to a more actionable local scale, and increases the diversity of ecological networks that can be projected in space.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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".