The impact of elevation and proximity to trails on plant biodiversity in mountain ecosystems surrounding Flagstaff, AZ, USA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objectives of this project were to compare biodiversity along an elevation gradient in the mountains surrounding Flagstaff, Arizona. In addition, identify the presence or absence of four specific non-native species being monitored using the Mountain Invasion Research Network (MIREN) protocol: common yarrow (Achillea millefolium), red clover (Trifolium pratense), white clover (Trifolium repens), narrowleaf plantain (Plantago lanceolata). The study used T-shaped transects at randomly selected sampling locations to collect data on richness and abundance of plant species up to 22 m from four hiking trails. Measured sample location was the middle point of the trailside or "near" sample unit. The "near" sample unit (2 m deep * 10 m parallel) was parallel with the trail. The other two sample units "middle" and "far" were perpendicular to the trail, starting 2 m from the measured sample location. Simpsons (1-D) and Shannon's Index were used to determine alpha biodiversity (diversity within a community (Magurran & McGill, 2011) along the elevation gradient. Jaccard Index and Morista-Horn Index used to compare dissimilarity of beta diversity (diversity between communities (Magurran & McGill, 2011)) between elevation zones and proximity to the trail. Dissimilarity is the amount of difference between communities. The study demonstrated species richness decreased as sample location elevation increased. Species richness also decreased as the distance from the trail increased. Simpson's and Shannon's biodiversity indices both showed a statistically significant difference in biodiversity values decreasing with an increase in elevation. Dissimilarity index values for both beta diversity indices indicated a statistically significant difference in dissimilarity based on proximity to the trail. The presence of common yarrow was only found at two sampling locations preventing further analysis. All trails had similar relative abundances but the dominant species along each trail was different. Elevation plays a determining role in the richness and diversity of species in mountain ecosystems surrounding Flagstaff, Arizona.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".