Arthropod species loss underpins biomass declines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent declines in arthropod diversity, abundance and biomass are central to the global biodiversity crisis. Yet, we lack a mechanistic understanding of the respective contributions of species richness, species identity and abundance to overall biomass change, and how the environment filters these processes. Synthesizing 11 years of data from a biodiversity experiment and from farmed grasslands in central Europe across a gradient of plant species richness and land-use intensity, we show that local arthropod biomass declines were predominantly (>90%) linked to species richness losses. Abundance declines among persisting species accounted for only 5-8% of lost biomass. The role of species identity depended on the environment and diminished over time: especially under high plant diversity and low land-use intensity, arthropod species with both below-average total biomass and above-average individual biomass (large, rare species) contributed disproportionately to species turnover-but this was only detectable in early years when the communities were still relatively abundant. We conclude that arthropod communities are currently homogenizing towards few common species of similar biomass, probably reducing their adaptability to future environmental change. Increasing the diversity and reducing the land-use intensity of grasslands may mitigate ongoing community simplification and loss of arthropod diversity and functioning.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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 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".