Checklist and status of the amphibians and reptiles of Essex County, Ontario: a 35 year update
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Essex County, Ontario, supports a diverse assemblage of Canadian herpetofauna. It is home to the only Canadian populations of three species/subspecies and contains two of Canada’s 11 Important Amphibian and Reptile Areas. A checklist and status assessment of the herpetofauna of Essex County was previously compiled in 1983. Changes to natural habitats and an increase in monitoring efforts (e.g., citizen science) over the past 35 years warrant an updated assessment of herpetofaunal status. The county was subdivided using a 10 x 10 km grid overlay, and recent observations (1997–2016) submitted to provincial databases were tabulated for each grid square. We compared current status’ of herpetofauna in Essex County to those of the 1983 study using a similar classification scheme of ‘extirpated from Essex’ (EE; no recent observations) and ‘rare in Essex’ (RE; distribution ≤5 squares). We found that 11 species declined in status. The majority of reptiles and amphibians (62%) that historically occurred in Essex County are now either EE (31%) or RE (31%) and almost half (45%) of the 29 extant species/subspecies are RE. A large proportion of salamanders and squamates are EE or RE (86% and 65%, respectively). Amount of natural area and sampling effort were important variables describing patterns of observed herpetofaunal species/subspecies richness, and observed richness was highest along the western and southern edges of the mainland (16–19 species). To prevent future extirpations, recovery efforts in Essex County should occur across multiple locations and target RE species.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".