A Registry-Bound LLM Pipeline for Evidence-Grounded Trait Extraction across Tropical Plants, Aquatic Species, and Exotic Pets

We describe a versioned cross-domain dataset of 410,499 active tropical species (working snapshot 2026-04-20) spanning three applied subdomains -- tropical_plants, tropical_aquatic, and tropical_pets -- that share a commercial and regulatory life cycle but are distributed across kingdom-organised biodiversity infrastructures. The resource joins taxonomic identifiers from GBIF, Plants of the World Online, iNaturalist, NCBI Taxonomy, the Catalogue of Life and the Encyclopedia of Life, and adds three original layers: a cross-domain ontology that re-segments taxa along trade and husbandry contexts; a Chinese vernacular layer with explicit per-name provenance under a typology that excludes unverified machine-generated proposals; and a CITES source-linkage layer connecting each taxon to its Species+ entry. Chinese vernacular coverage -- the proportion of taxa carrying a CJK Chinese name distinct from the scientific binomial -- reaches 99.50 percent (408,456 of 410,499; full-population count). Coverage characterises completeness, not name-translation accuracy; the latter is bounded by the four-level provenance typology and is the subject of a preliminary internal review reported here, with a blind external audit identified as the principal open item. Upstream content is referenced by stable identifier only for the original-contribution layers, supporting CC-BY 4.0 reuse. The dataset is deposited on Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.20377811). This preprint is the canonical v1.0 description of the dataset's current state; future Data Descriptor submission is anticipated but is contingent on the validation and release-engineering items listed in the Limitations.

Cell-type-specific marker genes are fundamental to plant biology, yet existing resources primarily rely on curated databases or high-throughput studies without explicitly modeling the supporting evidence found in scientific literature. We introduce PlantMarkerBench, a multi-species benchmark for evaluating literature-grounded plant marker evidence interpretation from full-text biological papers. PlantMarkerBench is constructed using a modular curation pipeline integrating large-scale literature retrieval, hybrid search, species-aware biological grounding, structured evidence extraction, and targeted human review. The benchmark spans four plant species -- Arabidopsis, maize, rice, and tomato -- and contains 5,550 sentence-level evidence instances annotated for marker-evidence validity, evidence type, and support strength. We define two benchmark tasks: determining whether a candidate sentence provides valid marker evidence for a gene-cell-type pair, and classifying the evidence into expression, localization, function, indirect, or negative categories. We benchmark diverse open-weight and closed-source language models across species and prompting strategies. Although frontier models achieve relatively strong performance on direct expression evidence, performance drops substantially on functional, indirect, and weak-support evidence, with evidence-type confusion emerging as a dominant failure mode. Open-weight models additionally exhibit elevated false-positive rates under ambiguous biological contexts. PlantMarkerBench provides a challenging and reproducible evaluation framework for literature-grounded biological evidence attribution and supports future research on trustworthy scientific information extraction and AI-assisted plant biology.

What a language model will and will not do is largely set during post-training, but which behaviors it expresses, hides, or resists is not revealed by prompting alone. Persona vectors, behavioral directions in activation space, can probe this organization, but prior work covers only a handful of traits. We present the first systematic application of persona vectors at this scale, compiling a 53-trait inventory across four behaviorally distinct domains and labeling every trait in two open-weight models as natural (expressed at baseline), steerable latent but amplifiable, or intractable (resistant to standard extraction). Both models default to helpful, task-oriented behavior: all nine agentic traits are natural, and their default clinician behavior matches a board-certified psychologist's independent desirability judgments on 16 of 17 traits. Steering produces its largest gains on traits these defaults exclude: hyperbole, hallucination, and sycophancy. The same asymmetry holds across all 171 generic-trait pairs: two steerable traits can collapse the composition, but pairs involving a default never do. Where standard extraction fails on a trait like "evil," a vector transferred from a fine-tuned variant still recovers it, with the residual refusals appearing inside the model's chain-of-thought. Persona vectors are most informative not as a set of controls but as a probe of behavioral organization.