Invasion by common reed in peri-urban wetlands does not affect insectivorous bat activity, despite a negative effect on prey abundance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Common reed ( Phragmites australis ), an exotic invasive plant in North America, alters wetlands and thus affects the abundance, development and behavior of many animal species. We evaluated the effect of common reed invasion on 1) the abundance of nocturnal flying insects, and 2) the activity of one of their predators, insectivorous bats. As bats are highly mobile, they can be affected by parameters at a broad scale. Therefore, we considered 3) the effect of habitats and roads around invaded and non-invaded sites on bat activity. We selected 28 paired sites located in wetlands in southwestern Quebec: 14 control sites and 14 common reed-dominated sites. Nocturnal flying insects were collected in some sites, using light traps. The activity of bats was measured in all sites using acoustic detectors. Habitats and high-traffic roads around the sampled sites were characterized over several spatial scales, using ArcGISPro. Our results showed that the number of nocturnal flying insects was reduced by 53% in common reed-dominated sites, but there was no influence on the overall activity of insectivorous bats. Instead, a larger relative area of aquatic and woodland habitats, within a respective radius of 1 and 2 km in the vicinity of our study sites, favoured the overall activity of bats. Moreover, bat activity decreased with an increase in the length of high-traffic roads within a radius of 200 m around the studied wetland sites. Our results suggest that invasive plants despite reducing insect prey may not represent a major threat to insectivorous bats. They also highlight the importance of protecting forests and aquatic habitats, as well as the need to implement road mitigation measures for the conservation of insectivorous bats.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".