A light in the dark: using cabled seafloor observatories to study \nabundance and behaviour of seafloor megafauna in response to \nenvironmental change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Surface primary productivity forms the base of most marine food webs and contributes \nsignificantly to global carbon cycling, providing a key link from surface to seafloor. High \nseasonal primary productivity along temperate latitude coastlines provides crucial nutrients for \nseafloor communities, driving spatiotemporal patterns in abundance, behaviour, biodiversity, and \ndistribution of benthic megafauna. Many factors, including ocean warming, deoxygenation, and \nincreasing frequency and duration of marine heatwaves (MHW), may alter the dynamics \ngoverning primary production, threatening benthic organisms that depend on the seasonal input \nof phytodetritus for food. The focus of this thesis is to make use of two seafloor observatories, \nNEPTUNE near Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and a new platform in Conception Bay, \nNL, to examine variability in abundance, behaviour, and composition of seafloor communities in \nresponse to environmental change across temporal scales. First, the response of the deep-sea pink \nurchin Strongylocentrotus fragilis to a recent MHW on the continental margin off the coast of \nVancouver Island was investigated using a combination of benthic trawls (2004-2018) and \nseafloor observatory data (2013-2020). Sea urchin density declined during the MHW, likely in \nresponse to reduced kelp subsidies from coastal waters. Next, the new Holyrood Underwater \nObservatory in Conception Bay was used to study benthic community response to the spring \nphytoplankton bloom. High-frequency variability in seafloor environmental dynamics was \ndocumented during the winter-spring transition, and the unexpected emergence of >200 sea \ncucumbers (Psolus sp.) coinciding with the arrival of phytodetritus at the seafloor was observed. \nThese data will provide a baseline against which to monitor changes in phenology as climate \nchange progresses. This work comes at a critical point in ocean observing as we approach global \nclimate tipping points. Now more than ever, it is essential to document the current state of \nmarine communities to understand and predict community responses to changing ocean \nconditions, and to sustainably manage ocean resources.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".