Global status and research priorities for rhino rays
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
Global biodiversity continues to decline in the terrestrial and aquatic realms. Across animal groups, threatened species are at risk of extinction if not managed effectively and permitted to recover. The cartilaginous fish order Rhinopristiformes (rhino rays) comprises 5 families: sawfishes, wedgefishes, guitarfishes, giant guitarfishes, and banjo rays. While the global plight of sawfishes, which are heavily depleted and have undergone range contraction unprecedented in cartilaginous fishes, has drawn attention to their status, the other families have received less focus to date. To highlight research on the non-sawfish rhino rays, the American Elasmobranch Society held the inaugural Global Wedgefish & Guitarfish Symposium in 2021. This Special Issue of Endangered Species Re search presents a series of papers from that symposium. Rhino rays (68 species globally) face an extremely elevated risk of extinction, with nearly three-quarters of species threatened (72.7%; Critically Endangered, Endangered, or Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species) and nearly half (48.5%) of all species classified as Critically Endangered. This level of critical endangerment is amongst the highest of all 136 vertebrate orders, with rhino rays ranking only below sturgeons and paddlefishes (order Acipenseriformes) and coelacanths (Coelacanthiformes). Recommendations for research priorities were developed through an expert-elicitation approach in the fields of status, taxonomy, life history, habitat, molecular ecology, fisheries, trade, and ex situ breeding. Only significant investment in research priorities will strengthen the information base upon which to make conservation and management decisions and secure a future without extinctions for rhino rays.
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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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