Assessing the long‐term impact of <i>Ranavirus</i> infection in wild common frog populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Amphibians are declining worldwide, and one cause of this is infectious disease emergence. Mass mortalities caused by a virus or a group of viruses belonging to the genus Ranavirus have occurred in wild common frogs Rana temporaria in England since the 1980s, and ranaviral disease is widespread in amphibians in North America and Canada, where it can also cause mass die‐offs. Although there have been numerous reports of Ranavirus ‐associated mass mortality events, no study has yet evaluated the long‐term impacts of this disease. This study follows up archived records of English common frog mortalities likely caused by Ranavirus . There is a preliminary indication that common frog populations can respond differently to the emergence of disease: emergence may be transient, catastrophic, or persistent with recurrent mortality events. We subsequently focused on populations that had recurring mortality events ( n =18), and we report median declines of 81% in the number of adult frogs in these populations from 1996 to 2008. Comparable uninfected populations ( n =16) showed no change in population size over the same time period. Regressions show that larger frog populations may be more likely to experience larger declines than smaller populations, and linear models show that percentage population size change is significantly correlated with disease status, but that habitat age (a possible proxy for environmental quality) has no significant effect on population size change. Our results provide the first evidence of long‐term localized population declines of an amphibian species which appear to be best explained by the presence of Ranavirus infection.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".