Using nurse species as a potential nature-based solution for restoring herbaceous plant communities and soils in abandoned quarries in Lebanon : results from ex-situ mesocosm experiments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Mediterranean Basin, including Lebanon at its eastern end, is considered a hot spot of biodiversity with a high diversity of habitats accumulating around 25,000 plant species, of which half are considered endemic. Modern human colonization of the basin 10,000 years ago led to permanent modification in the ecosystem. This pressure has since not relented, particularly in Lebanon, where quarries are one of the most severe and pressing environmental issues, with approximately 1,300 quarries scattered throughout. After a literature review on the relevancy and limits of hydroseeding as a restoration practice in degraded semi-arid Mediterranean areas, the general goal of the Ph.D thesis is to propose an alternative practice based on the possibility of using potential nurse plants as a nature-based ecological tool for quarry restoration. To start, a general introduction with an extensive literature review encompassing various research concerning the theory of facilitation vs. competition in plant communities and a thorough examination of the nurse plant concept as a facilitation tool is proposed. Then, the used methodological approach is also presented, highlighting the purpose of experimenting in an ex-situ setting, and illustrating why and how various measurements have been calculated. The first chapter is an extensive literature review of the pros and cons of adopting the hydroseeding technique as a restoration tool in semi-arid Mediterranean environments. The second chapter focuses on the potential role of a native legume, Trifolium subterraneum L., as a potential nurse plant to assist various saplings of native plants to establish in degraded areas. The third chapter evaluated yet another nurse plant, Melica inaequiglumis, a tussock perennial grass to aid saplings of native plant species.Following these chapters, a third, and final section, sums up the thesis by highlighting perspectives, delivering a general discussion, and eventually summing up various suggestions for any projected future work.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".