Singleton-based species names and fungal rarity: Does the number really matter?
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
Fungi are among the least known organisms on earth, with an estimated number of species between 1.5 and 10 million. This number is expected to be refined, especially with increasing knowledge about microfungi in undersampled habitats and increasing amounts of data derived from environmental DNA sequencing. A significant proportion of newly generated sequences fail to match with already named species, and thus represent what has been referred to as fungal "dark taxa". Due to the challenges associated with observing, identifying, and preserving sporophores, many macro- and microfungal species are only known from a single collection, specimen, isolate, and/or sequence-a singleton. Mycologists are consequently used to working with "rare" sequences and specimens. However, rarity and singleton phenomena lack consideration and valorization in fungal studies. In particular, the practice of publishing new fungal species names based on a single specimen remains a cause of debate. Here, we provide some elements of reflection on this issue in the light of the specificities of the fungal kingdom and global change context. If multiple independent sources of data support the existence of a new taxon, we encourage mycologists to proceed with formal description, irrespective of the number of specimens at hand. Although the description of singleton-based species may not be considered best practice, it does represent responsible science in the light of closing the Linnean biodiversity shortfall.
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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 it