Native fishes, exotic mammals, and the conservation of desert springs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Desert springs are fragile ecosystems that often harbor endemic species of fishes and other taxa. Historically, these springs experienced major disturbances from Pleistocene megafauna, aboriginal humans, and livestock. However, management practices to preserve and restore spring ecosystems and biota have led to the removal of livestock. We document changes in spring habitats and extinctions of fish populations due to management practices at two spring reserves: Ash Meadows in the southwestern United States and Dalhousie in central Australia. After springs were fenced and livestock removed, these ecosystems experienced increases in riparian vegetation, reduction of open-water habitat, and extinction of fish populations. Despite manual removal of vegetation to maintain open-water habitat, at least one pupfish population went extinct in Ash Meadows, and 18 populations, representing four of the five species native to desert springs in the Dalhousie reserve, also went extinct. To maintain the diversity of aquatic habitats and endemic biota, management of small desert springs must include substantial disturbance.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".