Migratory Birds and the Spread of West Nile
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We read with substantial apprehension the News Focus article on the spread of West Nile Virus (WNV) across the United States and its concomitant decimation of bird populations (West Nile's surprisingly swift continental sweep, M. Enserink, 20 Sept., p. 1988; and sidebar Bird advocates fear that West Nile virus could silence the spring, D. Malakoff, p. 1989). Many of the survivors among these populations are very likely to spread WNV throughout the Neotropics in this northern winter, if they have not already done so during the last several winters. It is particularly ominous that our observations of scores of species of small northern migrants (e.g., warblers and thrushes) this January in the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste in northwestern Costa Rica ([1][1]) suggest that there is a precipituous decline in their abundance compared with previous years. Parallel observations from other neotropical continental areas would be opportune, as well as from the Caribbean, as mentioned in the sidebar by Malakoff. This apparent decline in Costa Rica could well be due to fewer migrants arriving, virus-based death in transit or on the wintering grounds, or even disproportionally harsh predation by resident predators accustomed to preying on abundant migrants. Our ongoing inventory of the internal parasites of these migrants and their sympatric residents ([2][2]) hopefully will indicate whether WNV has arrived as we expect and is spreading [however, there are no recorded cases of WNV in Costa Rica at this time ([3][3])], and whether the apparent severe reduction in northern migrants is indeed a persistent phenomenon. If this is the case, the impact of such a multispecies epidemic on these species-rich and interaction-rich tropical communities will be another dramatic and sad example of the way in which unanticipated consequences of human activity have harmed the wildland tropics. 1. [↵][4]See [www.acguanacaste.ac.cr][5]. 2. [↵][6]See . 3. [↵][7]R. Saenz, Costa Rican Minister of Health, personal communication. [1]: #ref-1 [2]: #ref-2 [3]: #ref-3 [4]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference in text [5]: http://www.acguanacaste.ac.cr [6]: #xref-ref-2-1 View reference in text [7]: #xref-ref-3-1 View reference in text
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".