Restoring ecological function: Interactions between vertebrates and latrines in a reintroduced population of Rhinoceros unicornis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reintroduction is a highly effective strategy for rebuilding wildlife populations and restoring their ecosystem functions, but impacts on function are poorly documented. We addressed this gap by comparing the species richness and visit rate of mammals and birds that interact with rhino ( Rhinoceros unicornis ) latrines at two locations in Nepal: Chitwan National Park, with a stable rhino population, and Shuklaphanta National Park, where a rhino reintroduction program was conducted from 2003 to 2018. Camera-traps were used to monitor visitors to 30 latrines in both parks from 2020 to 2021 (669 camera-trap days). The reintroduction of rhinos to Shuklaphanta National Park has played a crucial role in restoring an important resource for other mammal and bird species. Despite a large difference in rhino abundance, and differences in the size, quality and some of the nutritional contents of latrines between sites, there were no significant differences in species richness of latrine visitors and in the frequency of most behaviours at the latrines. Visit rates of animals were higher at the reintroduction site, confirming latrines to be important, limited resources. Overall, 4 mammal and 4 bird species used the latrines to consume the dung, or insects and plants growing on and around the dung; a further two mammal species interacted only indirectly with the latrines. These findings provide evidence that even at low population densities, rhino reintroduction can successfully restore an important ecological function and provide vital resources for other species. Our study supports the rewilding of large-bodied animals to mitigate ecosystem deterioration.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 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".