Double-Crested Cormorant Colony Effects on Soil Chemistry, Vegetation Structure and Avian Diversity in a Southeastern Reservoir System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ornithogenic material delivered by Double-crested Cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) from their nesting colonies have been documented to effect vegetation, soil chemistry and tree and plant health in the northern breeding grounds of Canada and the United States (U.S.). However, little work has been done on impacts to avian communities or in temperate forest ecosystems. We compared soil chemistry, vegetation and tree structure and diversity and effects on avian communities among colony islands, uninhabited islands and abandoned colony islands within Guntersville Reservoir, a temperate forest ecosystem. Concentrations of potassium (K), phosphorus (P) and nitrate (NO3-) in soil were negatively related to cormorant use, while tree diversity was lower on historic (tree mean = 4.35 ± 2.46 species) and colony (tree mean = 3.91 ± 3.12 species) islands relative to control islands (tree mean = 9.11 ± 3.88 species). Canopy cover was less (min: < 20%), and midstories denser on colony and historic islands relative to control islands. Avian diversity was lower for colony islands (mean = 6 ± 3 species) than both control (11 ± 7 species) and historic (10 ± 7 species) islands. These effects of cormorant nesting can be seen even after 10 years of colony abandonment supporting that cormorants can have long-term effects on insular habitats even in temperate forest ecosystems.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".