Conservation Conundrum: At-risk Bumble Bees (Bombus spp.) Show Preference for Invasive Tufted Vetch (Vicia cracca) While Foraging in Protected Areas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent decades, some bumble bee species have declined, including in North America. Declines have been reported in species of bumble bees historically present in Ontario, including: yellow bumble bee (Bombus fervidus) (Fabricus, 1798), American bumble bee (Bombus pensylvanicus) (DeGeer, 1773), and yellow-banded bumble bee (Bombus terricola) (Kirby, 1837). Threats contributing to bumble bee population declines include: land-use changes, habitat loss, climate change, pathogen spillover, and pesticide use. A response to the need for action on pollinator preservation in North America has been to encourage 'bee-friendly' plantings. Previous studies show differences in common and at-risk bumble bee foraging; however, similar data are unavailable for Ontario. Our research question is whether there is a difference in co-occurring at-risk and common bumble bee (Bombus spp.) floral use (including nectar and pollen collection) in protected areas in southern Ontario. We hypothesize that common and at-risk species forage differently, predicting that at-risk species forage on a limited selection of host plants. We conducted a field survey of sites in southern Ontario, using observational methods to determine bumble bee foraging by species. The results of a redundancy analysis show a difference in foraging between common and at-risk bumblebee species. At-risk bumble bee species show a preference for foraging on invasive, naturalized Vicia cracca (tufted vetch). This finding raises the question of how to preserve or provide forage for at-risk bumble bees, when they show an association with an invasive species often subject to control in protected areas.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".