Back

Simplicity in numbers: Implications of diversity for the community Bioturbation Potential (BPc)

Neumann, A.; Wrede, A.

2020-04-23 ecology
10.1101/2020.04.21.053728 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The mobility of particles and solutes within aquatic sediment is substantially impacted by faunal bioturbation activities such as bioirrigation and sediment reworking. The non-quantitative community bioturbation potential (BPc) aims to estimate the potential of a given benthic community for bioturbation activities, based on the functional traits of the species within that community. We argue that in sufficiently diverse communities, the characteristics of individual species, expressed as traits scores, average each other out, and approach a universal constant. This enables to derive a simpler community bioturbation potential (BPs), which may be applied in cases when taxonomic expertise or trait data are not available. As a proof of concept, we evaluated a dataset of 84 benthos assemblages, and found a high degree of agreement of full BPc and simplified BPs.

Matching journals

The top 11 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.