Nature on the Home Front: British Ecologists' Advocacy for Science and Conservation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the 1940s British ecologists successfully advocated for establishment of the Nature Conservancy: a national agency that would conduct ecological research, designate and maintain nature reserves and advise on conservation. This initiative was, in part, a response to the political and institutional circumstances of wartime and postwar Great Britain. A corporatist political culture that was receptive to scientific advice, as well as wartime urgency and postwar enthusiasm for planning, assisted ecologists in their advocacy for a new perspective on British landscapes. Prospects for postwar development encouraged agreement that this new perspective was necessary. However, ecologists' advocacy also reflected a new phase in the development of their discipline. By the late 1930s leading British ecologists, such as Arthur Tansley, Charles Elton and William Pearsall were contemplating new approaches to ecological research: a focus on processes and ecosystems and greater use of experiments and long-term observations in the field. They were also shifting their geographical perspective from an imperial orientation to one more focused on the British landscape. These innovations required the conditions - protected areas, stable support for research and autonomy in choice of research questions - that the Nature Conservancy could provide. Thus, ecologists viewed conservation as essential to both the protection of the ecological and aesthetic values of the British landscape and the development and transformation of their research.
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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 | 0.021 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".