Effectiveness of bat boxes for bat conservation and insect suppression in a Western Australian urban riverine reserve
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Urban wetlands are important habitat for wildlife, particularly insectivorous bats which provide a key ecosystem service in suppressing insects. While claims are often made that bats consume high numbers of mosquitoes in a given night, the evidence for this claim is scant at best. The Canning River Regional Park (CRRP), an urban riverine reserve in Western Australia, has fauna conservation as a primary goal and mosquito control as a top priority. We took advantage of occupied bat boxes within the CRRP to determine the roosting bat species and their diet using non‐invasive DNA metabarcoding of bat faecal samples. The widespread and urban‐adapted Chalinolobus gouldii was the only bat species detected roosting in the bat boxes. This opportunistic forager consumed over 700 unique prey (operational taxonomic units; OTUs); only 14% of OTUs were assigned to either species or genus, representing seven insect orders. Mosquitoes were detected in 11% of the 90 faecal samples, over multiple years and in both the maternity and non‐maternity seasons. Assigned prey was predominantly Lepidoptera with 40% of the 49 Lepidoptera species negatively impacting humans. Urban riverine reserves are critical habitat for bats, which in turn, are crucial in providing the ecosystem service of insect suppression.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".