Extinction Dynamics Under Extreme Conservation Threat: The Flora of St Helena
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The flora of the island of St Helena provides an amplified system for the study of extinction by reason of the island’s high endemism, small size, vulnerable biota, length of time of severe disturbance (since 1502) and severity of threats. Endemic plants have been eliminated from 96.5% of St Helena by habitat loss. There are eight recorded extinctions in the vascular flora since 1771 giving an extinction rate of 581 extinctions per million species per year (E/MSY). This is considerably higher than background extinction rates, variously estimated at 1 or 0.1 E/MSY. We have no information for plant extinctions prior to 1771 but applying the same extinction rate to the period 1502 to 1771 suggests that there may be around ten unrecorded historical extinctions. We use census data and population decline estimates to project likely extinction forward in time. The projected overall extinction rate for the next 200 years is somewhat higher at 625 E/MSY. However, our data predict an extinction crunch in the next 50 years with 4 species out of the remaining 48 likely to become extinct during this period. It is interesting that during a period when the native plant areas dropped to 3.5% of the original, the extinction rate appears to have remained shallowly linear with under 30% of the endemic flora becoming extinct.
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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".