Emerging threat of the 21st century lightscape to global biodiversity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last century the temporal and spatial distribution of light on Earth has been drastically altered by human activity. Despite mounting evidence of detrimental effects of light pollution on organisms and their trophic interactions, the extent to which light pollution threatens biodiversity on a global scale remains unclear. We assessed the spatial extent and magnitude of light encroachment by measuring change in the extent of light using satellite imagery from 1992 to 2012 relative to species richness for terrestrial and freshwater mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. The encroachment of light into previously dark areas was consistently high, often doubling, in areas of high species richness for all four groups. This pattern persisted for nocturnal groups (e.g., bats, owls, and geckos) and species considered vulnerable to extinction. Areas with high species richness and large increases in light extent were clustered within newly industrialized regions where expansion of light is likely to continue unabated unless we act to conserve remaining darkness. Implementing change at a global scale requires global public, and therefore scientific, support. Here, we offer substantial evidence that light extent is increasing where biodiversity is high, representing an emerging threat to global biodiversity requiring immediate attention.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".