Decline in whistling rat (<i>Parotomys brantsii</i>) density: Possible response to climate change in the Karoo, South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The burrow systems (warrens) of whistling rat Parotomys brantsii are confined to patches of deep soil (biogenic mounds known as heuweltjies ) on stony plains in the arid Succulent Karoo region of South Africa. Whistling rat warrens were recorded on heuweltjies at the Tierberg Long‐Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in the southern Karoo, Western Cape Province, South Africa, on eight occasions between 1988 and 2001. Increasing temperatures over the study period combined with a severe drought from 2015 to 2021 caused a 36% dieback in perennial shrub cover on the research site. The percentage of heuweltjies occupied by whistling rats declined from 44% occupation to 20% occupation between 2005 and 2021 during unusually hot, dry conditions indicated by low values in the Standardised Evapotranspiration Index. Around their warrens, whistling rats had no influence on species richness of perennial plants but reduced vegetation cover.
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.
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 | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".