Primate field research during a pandemic: Lessons learned from the SARS‐CoV‐2 outbreak
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly halted most primate field research in early 2020. While international travel bans and regional travel restrictions made continuing primate field research impossible early on in the pandemic, ethical concerns of transmitting the virus from researchers to primates and surrounding human communities informed decisions regarding the timing of resuming research. Between June and September 2020, we surveyed field primatologists regarding the impacts of the pandemic on their research. We received 90 completed surveys from respondents residing in 21 countries, though most were from the United States and Canada. These data provide a valuable window into the perspectives and actions taken by researchers during the early stages of the pandemic as events were still unfolding. Only 2.4% of projects reported continuing research as usual, 33.7% continued with some decrease in productivity, 42.2% reported postponing research projects, and 21.7% reported canceling projects or postponing research indefinitely. Respondents most severely impacted by the pandemic were those establishing new field sites and graduate students whose projects were postponed or canceled due to pandemic-related shutdowns. Fears about increased poaching, the inability to pay local assistants, frozen research funds, declining habituation, disruptions to data collection, and delays in student projects were among the top concerns of respondents. Nearly all the projects able to continue research in any capacity during the early months of the pandemic were run by or employed primate habitat country primatologists. This finding is a major lesson learned from the pandemic; without habitat country scientists, primate research is not sustainable.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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".