Climate but Not Land Use Influences Body Size of Fowler's Toad (<i>Anaxyrus fowleri</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Anthropogenic changes to the environment have been associated with changes in body size of multiple organisms. However, although climate and land use influences on body size have been examined separately, the simultaneous effects and potential interactions of these two factors on body size have rarely been studied. We examined the size and mass of a common North American toad (Fowler's toad, Anaxyrus fowleri) using museum specimens from 1931 to 1998 to quantify the potential interactive effects of climate change (temperature and precipitation) and land use change (forested area) on body size. We found that snout–vent length (SVL) and mass declined over time, and that size was negatively related to both temperature and precipitation (smaller size at higher values of temperature and precipitation). We did not find evidence of an effect of forest cover on size or mass. Our results suggest that Fowler's toad body size is affected by climate but not land use, and we encourage further examination of additional species and land cover variables (such as urbanization) to determine whether our results are representative of ectotherms more broadly. This work highlights the strength of climate in determining anuran body size and contrasts with existing studies showing interactive effects of climate and land use on animal body size.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 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".