A descriptive analysis of recent changes in benthic communities at Evangeline Beach, Nova Scotia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Minas Basin is a megatidal system (up to 15m tidal range) with extensive mudflats that are home to infauna such as molluscs, nematodes, crustaceans and polychaetes, these animals in turn, are important energy sources for larger animals such as shorebirds and fish. My study objective was to establish a Natural Geography of In Shore Areas (NaGISA) site in the Southern Bight of the Minas Basin as a reference point for monitoring long term change in intertidal communities, and to document the biological characteristics of this site. The first extensive survey of Minas Basin infauna, by Gratto in 1978, found that the benthos of Evangeline Beach was dominated by few species of infauna, and the majority of species found were uncommon. The question arises as to whether recent changes (30 years) in infauna distribution can be detected in the Minas Basin. I re-sampled two transects that Gratto (1978) established at Evangeline Beach, with 5 replicate samples at each of the low, mid and high intertidal zones. The 2008 samples contained a higher number of taxa than did historic (1978) samples and density was greater by an order of magnitude. Samples from the low intertidal zone contained 8000 individuals/ m2 in 1978 and >65,000 / m2 in 2008; a similar increase was found for the mid and high intertidal zones. Some individual species showed a marked change in relative abundance. For example, the spionid Pygospio elegans increased in abundance from 13% (1978) to 73% (2008) of the infauna sampled. These results suggest that the intertidal community at Evangeline Beach has changed considerably over 30 years. Historic data, however, are likely influenced by differences in sample processing effort. This NaGISA site, now established, forms an important baseline for long-term monitoring of benthic community structure in this dynamic ecosystem.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".