Limited short-term impact of lemming grazing on vascular plants under experimentally reduced predation in the High Arctic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Population fluctuations of lemmings in the High Arctic appear to be driven by predator–prey interactions. However, lemming grazing can sometimes have a strong impact on the vegetation during population peaks, suggesting a possible role of plant–herbivore interactions. We use a large-scale experiment where predators were excluded to investigate whether predator reduction could have cascading effects on the vegetation through an increase in lemming densities in the Canadian Arctic. Morphological traits and biomass of Salix arctica and the biomass of Poaceae and Juncaceae were sampled inside and outside lemming exclosures. We detected signs of lemming grazing on the number of buds and catkins of S. arctica at snowmelt, and stem length, stem growth, and number of leaves during the summer but the impact was relatively small. We did not detect an impact of grazing on plant biomass during the summer. We also found limited evidence that the impact of grazing was higher in the predator exclosure even though lemming density increased up to two-fold. Our results suggest that the short-term impact of lemmings on vascular plants is relatively small and that an experimental increase in lemming density did not have a cascading effect on the plants consumed by these herbivores in the Canadian Arctic.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".