An analysis of the contrasting fates of locust swarms on the plains of North America and East Asia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Prior to ~1880 AD locust swarms periodically raged across both the North American Plains (NAP) and East Asian Plains (EAP). After this date, locust outbreaks almost never recurred on the NAP but have continued to cause problems on the EAP. The large quantities of pesticides used in the major agriculture regions of the NAP in the late 1870s have been suggested as a possible reason for the disappearance of locust outbreaks in this area. Extensive applications of modern, i.e. more effective, chemical pesticides were also used in the granary regions of the EAP in the 1950s in an effort to reduce pest outbreaks. However, locust swarms returned again in many areas of China in the 1960s. Therefore, locust extinction on the NAP still remains a puzzle. Frequent locust outbreaks on the EAP over the past 130 yr may offer clues to the key factors that control the disappearance of locust outbreaks on the NAP. This study analysed the climate extremes and monthly temperature–precipitation combinations for the NAP and EAP, and found that differences in the frequencies of these climate combinations resulted in the contrasting locust fates in the two regions: restricting locust outbreaks in the NAP but inducing such events in the EAP. Validation shows that severe EAP locust outbreak years were coincidental with extreme climate-combination years. Therefore, we suggest that changes in frequency, extremes and trends in climate can explain why the fate of locust outbreaks in the EAP was different from that in the NAP. The results also suggest that, with present global warming trends, precautionary measures should be taken to make sure other similar pest infestations do not occur in either region.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".