Forest Habitat Characteristics Associated with Simplocaria metallica (Sturm) and Other Pill Beetle Species (Coleoptera: Byrrhidae) in Northern Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite close and potentially interesting associations between pill beetles (Coleoptera: Byrrhidae) and bryophytes on which they are obligate feeders, little is known about byrrhid ecology in Canadian forests. To determine the extent to which boreal forest stands support populations of pill beetles, we established a systematic sampling grid of 200 sampling sites covering 82 km2 of boreal mixedwood forest in northwestern Alberta. We found that byrrhid species, especially Simplocaria metallica (Sturm), occur in association with stands of small black spruce (Picea mariana (Mill.) BSP; Pinaceae) subject to frequent disturbances. The habitat occupied by black spruce in this part of the boreal forest also includes potential bryophyte hosts of several pill beetle species. Our findings suggest that pill beetles can be used as indicators of disturbances such as fire, harvest, gravel pit construction, and road ditching. They seem to flourish in frequently disturbed forested habitats such as peat bogs and taiga forest that provide arid environmental conditions similar to arctic or alpine environments.
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 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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".