The role of taboos in conservation of sacred groves in Ghana's Tallensi-Nabdam district
Bibliographic record
Abstract
More than half of Ghana's forest cover has been lost to deforestation. Although the Tallensi-Nabdam district has suffered deforestation, portions of the biosphere called sacred groves have survived. The purpose of this study was to explore the particular reasons why the groves have thrived by articulating precise sacred grove taboos, many of which are gender specific. Our enquiry led to a compendium of taboos categorized into environmental, social and regulatory conventions. We found that the adherence to taboo and fear of repercussions, including barrenness and even death, plays a role in the continued preservation of the sacred groves. Also, people who do not adhere to traditional religions still stayed away from sacred groves to avoid dealing with traditional authorities. The paper indicates that in spite of modernization, taboos serve useful purposes in the conservation of biodiversity within sacred groves. The paper extends the argument that biodiversity conservation is linked with cultural preservation.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".