The new Noah's Ark: beautiful and useful species only. Part 1. Biodiversity conservation issues and priorities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most of the world's species at risk of extinction are neither particularly attractive nor obviously useful, and consequently lack conservation support. In contrast, the public, politicians, scientists, the media and conservation organisations are extremely sympathetic to a select number of well-known and admired species, variously called flagship, charismatic, iconic, emblematic, marquee and poster species. These are extremely attractive, large, entertaining or useful, and they receive the lion's share of public and private financial support, publicity, research, conservation and protective legislation. Such species have proven to be the best available means of increasing public awareness of the biodiversity crisis, and of mobilising financial support for conservation. They are widely touted as critical to the cause of conservation, not just symbolically, but also because preservation of their habitats, it has been claimed, can simultaneously preserve other species at risk. However, there is only limited evidence of ‘trickle-down’ benefits to rare, endemic and endangered species. Indeed, management strategies based on various ecologically-defined representative species (surrogate species, focal species, indicator species, keystone species, umbrella species) are only partially useful for aiding non-targeted species at risk. Aesthetic and commercial standards have become the primary determinants of which species in the natural world deserve conservation. Accordingly, the world's biodiversity is being beautified by selective conservation of attractive species, while the plight of the overwhelming majority of species is receiving limited attention.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.054 | 0.011 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".