Rural children know cavity-nesting birds of the Atlantic Forest but may underappreciate their critical habitat
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Cavity-nesting birds are a diverse and charismatic community, with a common need for tree cavities that make them vulnerable to land management by humans. However, little research has formally integrated human social aspects into management recommendations for the conservation of cavity-nesting birds. In agroecosystems, people’s management decisions modify and define the habitat availability for native cavity-nesting species. These behaviors during adulthood are related to people’s worldviews and are shaped, in part, by childhood experiences. Ongoing forest loss may reduce opportunities for children to interact with and learn from cavity-nesting birds and their habitats. We used a social–ecological framework to assess rural children’s knowledge and representations of native cavity-nesting birds and their habitats in agroecosystems of the threatened Atlantic Forest of Argentina. We employed “freelists” and “draw-and-explain” strategies with 235 children from 19 rural schools and then compared results with a 4-year dataset of trees (n = 328) and tree-cavity nests (n = 164) in the same study area. Children listed a high diversity (93 taxa) of native cavity-nesting birds, especially parrots (Psittacidae), toucans (Ramphastidae), and woodpeckers (Picidae), which they mostly recognized as cavity nesters. However, children drew agricultural landscapes with few of the habitat features that these birds require (e.g., tree cavities, native forest). Exotic trees were overrepresented in drawings (40% of mentions) compared to our field dataset of nests (10%) and trees on farms (15%). Although children mentioned and depicted a high diversity of native cavity-nesting birds, our results may reveal a problematic extinction of experience regarding how these birds interact with their habitat. To strengthen children’s contextualized knowledge and promote their long-term commitment to the conservation of cavity-nesting species, we recommend fostering meaningful experiences for children to interact with native cavity-nesting birds and recognize their habitat needs. A version of this article translated into Spanish is available in Supplementary Material 1.
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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".