Restoring Riparian Ecosystems with Large Predators: the Yellowstone Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Large predators can help shape the structure and functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. While various studies in national parks scattered across the western United States and Canada have shown the loss of large predators (e.g., wolves, cougar) allowed native ungulates (e.g., elk, mule deer) to greatly alter the structure and functioning of ecosystems via increased herbivory, studies of trophic effects of reintroduced/recolonized large predators have been relatively rare, with Yellowstone National Park being a major exception. The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park in 1995-97, after a 70 year absence, allowed for studies of trophic cascades of a restored large predator guild upon elk and woody species such as aspen, cottonwoods, willows, and berry- producing shrubs. Overall, these studies indicate that the reintroduction of wolves triggered a trophic cascade, in conjunction with bottom-up forces, with increasing recruitment (i.e., growth of woody plants into tall shrubs or trees) of browse species in riparian areas. This situation represent a fundamental change in plant community dynamics in comparison to previous decades of browsing suppression--when wolves were absent. Although wolf reintroduction has resulted in substantial initial effects to both plants and animals, the Yellowstone ecosystem still appears to be in the early stages of ecosystem recovery. In other areas of western North America where large carnivores have been previously extirpated or displaced, their recovery may be necessary for assisting in the ecological restoration of large herbivore altered 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".