This page walks through the top of the FORRT chain — three nanopublications that together turn one sentence in Soroye et al. 2020 into a structured, citable, machine-readable scientific claim.
Why three nanopubs and not one?¶
FORRT chains separate the act of citing a paper from the content of the claim and from how that claim is being tested. Each step strips away context until what’s left is the bare assertion that downstream Replication Studies and Outcomes can target.
| Step | Template | What it is | Why it exists |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Quote-with-comment | Verbatim quote from the paper + a personal comment + a citation | Anchors the chain in the paper, and lets the researcher say why this quote is worth replicating |
| 2 | AIDA sentence | A single Atomic-Independent-Declarative-Absolute version of the quote | Strips method language and hedging; what’s left is what can be replicated |
| 3 | FORRT Claim | The structured claim with topic tags, type, and links back to the paper | The unit that Replication Studies test |
1. Quote with comment¶
The quote is from Soroye’s Discussion / Conclusion section (page 3–4 of the published paper):
Using a spatially explicit method of measuring climatic position and its change over time, we show that risks of bumble bee extirpation rise in areas where local temperatures more frequently exceed species’ historical tolerances, whereas colonization probabilities in other areas rise as climate changes cause conditions to more frequently fall within species’ thermal limits.
Personal comment (the “why this matters” wrapped around the quote):
Replicating this claim on independent data is the prerequisite for using it: once the mechanism is validated, the same pipeline can be projected onto future climate scenarios to anticipate where pollinator extirpation risk will rise, flag candidate climate refugia for conservation prioritisation, or be extended to other thermally-sensitive insect taxa.
Show the Quote nanopub inline
View the Quote nanopub on Science Live →
2. AIDA sentence¶
The same idea, stripped to a single declarative sentence with no pronouns, no method language, and no hedges:
Local extirpation rate in bumble bee species rises in areas where local temperatures more frequently exceed species-specific historically observed thermal tolerances.
This is the form the Claim is structured around. Note what’s gone: “we show that…”, the colonization mirror, the spatial-explicit framing. What’s left is a claim about the world.
View the AIDA nanopub on Science Live →
3. FORRT Claim¶
The structured claim. Type: descriptive pattern (an observed empirical relationship between variables, in FORRT’s controlled vocabulary). Topics include bumblebee, climate change, pollinator decline, extinction, species distribution. Cited authority: the Soroye paper.
This is the node both Replication Studies (Phase 2 + Phase 3) target via the Search for a FORRT claim field on the Replication Study form.
Show the FORRT Claim nanopub inline
View the FORRT Claim nanopub on Science Live →
What comes next¶
The same Claim is now tested two ways:
Phase 2 — does the Python re-implementation reproduce Soroye’s result on Soroye’s own data?
Phase 3 — does the same pipeline still detect the signal on independent Iberian GBIF data?
- Soroye, P., Newbold, T., & Kerr, J. (2020). Climate change contributes to widespread declines among bumble bees across continents. Science, 367(6478), 685–688. 10.1126/science.aax8591