Metropolitan lizards? Urbanization gradient and the density of lagartixas (<i>Tropidurus hispidus</i>) in a tropical city
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Urbanization, with its cohort of environmental stressors, has a dramatic effect on wildlife, causing loss of biodiversity and decline in population abundance customarily associated with increasing levels of impervious surface and fragmentation of native habitats. Some studies suggest that faunal species from open habitats, and with higher abundance in natural environments, seem more likely to tolerate and live in urban environments. Here I evaluate how the level of urbanization affects lagartixas ( Tropidurus hispidus ) one of the most common lizards found in open vegetation ecosystems in NE Brazil. I surveyed a total of 47 transects across sites that differed in proportion of impervious surface (high, mild, peri‐urban, and rural). I also collected specific biotic (herbaceous cover, tree, and arthropod abundance) and abiotic (amount of shelters and impervious surfaces) factors that could affect lagartixas abundance. Ants were the most common arthropod both in the rural and urban environment. Lagartixas thrive in urban environments, and trees and shelter were key predictors of their abundance. Lagartixas show a clear association with use of artificial structures. The low densities of lagartixas in rural areas and higher density in urbanized areas suggest that they colonized urban areas due to the hard surfaces and they probably are not exploiting a novel habitat, but somewhat responding to conditions resembling those in which they evolved. Finally, lagartixas are extremely common in tropical cities, they have a suite of features that are associated with selective pressures in cities and they might play a key functional role in urban ecosystems making this lizard an excellent system for the study of ecology and adaptation to the urban environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".