The spatial distribution of a hummingbird‐pollinated plant is not strongly influenced by hummingbird abundance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PREMISE: Many angiosperms have evolved specialized systems that promote pollination by specific taxa. Therefore, plant distributions may be limited by the local abundance of their specialist pollinators. In eastern North America, Lobelia cardinalis is thought to be pollinated solely by Archilochus colubris, the only hummingbird species found in the region. Here we tested the hypothesis that the distribution of a plant species with specialized pollination is controlled by the range and abundance of its specialist pollinator. METHODS: We investigated the importance of A. colubris abundance, sourced from eBird, as a variable in a MaxEnt species distribution model of L. cardinalis using presence data from iNaturalist. We also compared hummingbird abundance between locations of L. cardinalis and congeneric during their respective flowering periods and explored whether the flowering periods of L. cardinalis and congenerics align with the week of peak local hummingbird abundance. RESULTS: Unexpectedly, MaxEnt modelling did not suggest that A. colubris abundance is a key driver of the species distribution. Lobelia cardinalis habitat suitability was lowest in the absence of A. colubris and increased with increasing abundance, but habitat suitability was also low in regions where hummingbird abundance is highest. Still, hummingbird abundance at L. cardinalis locations was generally higher than most congenerics, and L. cardinalis tended to flower near the week of local peak A. colubris abundance. CONCLUSIONS: While populations of hummingbird-pollinated plant species may require the local presence of hummingbirds, fine-scale variation in hummingbird abundance may not strongly influence their spatial distributions.
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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".