The ‘ecological character’ of wetlands: a foundational concept in the Ramsar Convention, yet still cause for debate 50 years later
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Ramsar Convention text requires the Contracting Parties to respond to actual or potential changes in the ‘ecological character’ of their Ramsar Sites. After some years, the Convention’s obligations relating to the conservation of these sites and to the ‘wise use’ of wetlands in general came to be defined in terms of ‘maintaining’ this character. Defining and operationalising these concepts has been complex. This paper reviews the evolution of this, and the challenges that remain in relation to issues such as choosing an appropriate baseline condition to describe, the kinds of changes that warrant a response and situations of natural fluctuation or ‘regime shift’, where ‘maintaining’ ecological character may be an unduly static aim. The ‘character’ of wetlands nevertheless remains a valuably integrative concept, preserving something of the holistic vision developed 50 years ago by the Convention’s founders.
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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.002 | 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 it