The Characteristics of Wild Rat (Rattus spp.) Populations from an Inner-City Neighborhood with a Focus on Factors Critical to the Understanding of Rat-Associated Zoonoses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Norway and black rats (Rattus norvegicus and Rattus rattus) are among the most ubiquitous urban wildlife species and are the source of a number of zoonotic diseases responsible for significant human morbidity and mortality in cities around the world. Rodent ecology is a primary determinant of the dynamics of zoonotic pathogens in rodent populations and the risk of pathogen transmission to people, yet many studies of rat-associated zoonoses do not account for the ecological characteristics of urban rat populations. This hinders the development of an in-depth understanding of the ecology of rat-associated zoonoses, limits comparability among studies, and can lead to erroneous conclusions. We conducted a year-long trapping-removal study to describe the ecological characteristics of urban rat populations in an inner-city neighborhood of Vancouver, Canada. The study focused on factors that might influence the ecology of zoonotic pathogens in these populations and/or our understanding of that ecology. We found that rat population density varied remarkably over short geographical distances, which could explain observed spatial distributions of rat-associated zoonoses and have implications for sampling and data analysis during research and surveillance. Season appeared to influence rat population composition even within the urban environment, which could cause temporal variation in pathogen prevalence. Body mass and bite wounds, which are often used in epidemiologic analyses as simple proxies for age and aggression, were shown to be more complex than previously thought. Finally, we found that factors associated with trapping can determine the size and composition of sampled rat population, and thus influence inferences made about the source population. These findings may help guide future studies of rats and rat-associated zoonoses.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".