The Return of the King or Bringing Snails to the Garden? The Human Dimensions of a Proposed Restoration of European Bison (<i>Bison bonasus</i>) in Germany
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human dimensions research can help resource and wildlife managers make informed decisions, target information efforts, and gain a greater understanding of the factors that comprise attitudes toward wildlife management efforts. Despite these often-stated merits, studies addressing the human dimensions of resource and wildlife management efforts are rare in Europe. A proposed restoration of free-ranging European bison (Bison bonasus) in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, has presented an opportunity to help address this research gap. During May to July 2006, we used a randomly distributed, self-administered questionnaire (n = 398) to assess local residents’ attitudes, beliefs, and levels of support or opposition toward the proposed restoration. These factors were compared across two administrative regions spanned by the proposed restoration area. We found that respondents from the Siegen-Wittgenstein region held significantly more positive attitudes and significantly higher knowledge levels than respondents from the Hochsauerlandkreis region. Principal components analysis revealed that attitudes comprised a general attitude factor pertaining to issues such as the importance of conserving bison for future generations and a lifestyle impact factor, which included items pertaining to bison-caused damages to trees and crops. Logistic regression was used to show the influence of fear of bison on attitudes. We discuss the likely causes and management implications of our findings and provide suggestions to managers wishing to target information efforts and address the concerns of those affected by the proposed restoration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".