Testing biodiversity-ecosystem function relations in nearshore marine sediments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rapid biodiversity loss is raising concerns about potential declines in the functioning of Earth’s ecosystems. Although decades of research explore biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) relations, empirical BEF assessments have lagged behind theoretical advances, particularly in marine benthic systems. Here, we incubate intact sediment push cores to examine the relationship between macroinfaunal community composition and benthic nutrient cycling in three nearshore sub-Arctic sites. First, we quantitatively assess potential effects of taxonomic and functional diversity, as well as community-weighted trait means, on oxygen and nutrient fluxes. Second, we examine fluxes in relation to macrofaunal abundance, oxygen consumption (a proxy for total core metabolism), and abundance of key functional groups, to test fundamental expectations based on ecological theory. We report distinct macrofaunal communities and contrasting benthic fluxes among sites, with oxygen and ammonium largely driving multivariate inter-site flux differences. Diversity indices and community-weighted trait means collectively explained ~76% of the variation in multivariate fluxes but provided little insight into the mechanistic links between diversity and functioning. In fact, we find that total macrofaunal abundance was the key driver of benthic fluxes at our sites, rather than functional community composition, which may have important implications for coastal conservation planning. Overall, our findings emphasize the highly context-dependent nature of BEF relationships and highlight the need to improve empirical understanding of these patterns in complex, natural 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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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 | 0.009 |
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".