Loggerhead sea turtle, Caretta caretta, presence and its exposure to floating marine litter in the Sardinia Channel and the Strait of Sicily: results from seven years of monitoring using ferry as platform of observation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The loggerhead turtle is the most common sea turtle species in the Mediterranean Sea. Despite relevant research efforts, information of its distribution is still scarce, particularly in the open sea where they may be exposed to different threats among which marine litter is of great concern. Here we investigated the distribution of loggerhead turtles and floating marine macro litter (FMML) in the Sardinia Channel and Strait of Sicily, a key area of the central Mediterranean Sea, by using 7 years of data collected by experienced observers aboard passenger ferries along commercial routes. The high-risk exposure areas were identified and the influence of upper layer currents on turtle and FMML distribution was evaluated. Overall, loggerhead sighting rates were higher than those reported from other Mediterranean routes but the distribution of turtles within the study area was clearly heterogeneous and influenced by the surface circulation pattern. Summer sighting rates were significantly higher in the Sardinia Channel with respect to the Strait of Sicily. Analysis of the co-occurrence of FMML and loggerhead turtles identified a priority risk area in the central Sardinian channel where the large South-Eastern Sardinia Gyre acts as a trap for both animals and FMML. This study corroborates the effectiveness of using passenger ferries as platforms of observation to conduct systematic surveys of sea turtles and floating macro litter in offshore areas. Results highlighted the importance of the Sardinia Channel and Strait of Sicily for the loggerhead turtle and the areas of greater risk of exposure to the marine litter threat.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".