Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background The principle that a single large habitat patch should hold more species than several small patches totalling the same area (SL > SS) is used by conservation agencies to favour protection of large, contiguous areas. Previous reviews of empirical studies have found the opposite, SS > SL, creating the single large or several small (SLOSS) debate. Aims Review the empirical and theoretical SLOSS literature; identify potential mechanisms underlying the SS > SL pattern; evaluate these where possible. Location Global. Time period 1976–2018. Major taxa Plants, invertebrates, vertebrates. Methods Literature review. Results Like previous reviews, I found that SS > SL dominates empirical findings. This pattern remained, although it was somewhat weakened, in studies where sampling intensity was proportional to patch size. I found six classes of theory, and conducted five preliminary evaluations of theory. None of the predictions was supported. The SS > SL pattern held for specialist species groups, suggesting it does not result from incursion by generalists into small patches. I found no evidence for the prediction that the reverse pattern (SL > SS) becomes more common over time since patch creation, through gradual species losses from SS. I found no difference between results for natural and anthropogenic patches. There was also no evidence for predictions that SL > SS is more common when the matrix is more hostile, or for stable than ephemeral patches. Main conclusions Most empirical comparisons find SS > SL. While there are several potential causes, more empirical work is needed to identify those at play. Meanwhile, conservation practitioners should understand that there is no ecological evidence supporting a general principle to preserve large, contiguous habitat areas rather than multiple small areas of the same total size.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it