Local environment and sampling bias drive parasite prevalence estimates in freshwater fish communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parasite occurrence and infection estimates vary through time and space, making understanding the underlying drivers highly complex. Comparative studies based on empirical data must consider the factors of variation involved in estimating infection metrics in natural populations to make appropriate and reliable comparisons. Using a multi‐scale approach, we explored the sources of variation in the estimation of infection prevalence, focusing on black spot disease in littoral freshwater fish communities sampled across 15 lakes in Québec, Canada. Method‐related sampling biases led to significant variations in prevalence estimates and spatial patterns of disease occurrence. Our results also indicated that low sampling efforts tend to overestimate the prevalence of infection in the landscape, with minimum sampling effort required to estimate an accurate infection prevalence depending on the sampling method employed. Our results showed that infection prevalence is spatially heterogeneous across the landscape with evidence of infection hotspots and coldspots. Physico‐chemical characteristics of the sites and local fish community structure were found to be the best drivers of infection at smaller spatial scales. Furthermore, our results suggest dilution effects, due to physical obstruction and compatibility barriers, limit the survival of the free‐living cercaria parasite life stage. Several relationships between infection prevalence and environmental drivers revealed non‐linearity, suggesting complex interactions. Examining infection prevalence data at various spatial scales revealed method‐induced biases, sampling effort effect, and environment‐driven relationships underscoring the importance of context‐dependencies and scale‐dependencies in empirical studies on host–parasite interactions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".