Impacts of road salt on seed germination of <i>Thuja occidentalis</i> found in natural communities adjacent to the Illinois Tollway in northeastern IL, USA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the USA, road salt usage in urban areas has increased since the 1950s. In the greater Chicago area over 175 000 tons of salt are applied every year. The salt runoff from this application has the potential to negatively impact nearby plants and alter native plant communities. We evaluated how varying salt concentrations affect overall germination, germination probability, and multiple metrics of germination speed for seeds from five source populations of Thuja occidentalis L. Two populations in a native forested fen system are susceptible to salt runoff from the Illinois Tollway. We found that increased salt concentrations decreased both the probability of germination and overall germination, and increased the time to germination. Seeds from the two natural populations performed poorly compared to the other populations. Salt pollution impacts the health and survival of adult trees, and may also inhibit the reproduction and recruitment of T. occidentalis. Reduction of salt pollution is necessary to maintain the long-term survival and persistence of this species, other sensitive species, and native fen habitats.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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 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".