Butterflies at porch lights: Exploring nocturnal light visitation in butterflies using community science data from <scp>iNaturalist</scp>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Artificial light at night (ALAN) is altering natural light conditions globally, with dramatic effects on insect behaviour. Flight‐to‐light behaviour is one of the most noticeable and ecologically significant impacts. Research has focused on nocturnal and crepuscular insect taxa, but diurnal insects also exhibit flight‐to‐light behaviour. Community science is increasingly recognised as useful for biological research. iNaturalist is an unstructured community science project where observations are geo‐tagged photos of organisms. We downloaded iNaturalist observations of butterflies at artificial light sources in the United States and Canada. We manually verified that observations were from light sources and recorded light source information. We examined light visitation in butterflies and checked for signals of natural history traits predicting light visitation at a species level. We compiled 384 observations of butterflies at light sources, representing 107 species, 74 genera and all six diurnal butterfly families. Most observations came from residential light sources or insect sampling/observation schemes (e.g., moth sheets). Observation frequency at lights varied across butterfly families: Lycaenidae were observed the most and Papilionidae the least. Habitat preference may influence light visitation: closed‐habitat species were observed more frequently than open‐habitat species. There were no clear relationships between observation frequency and wingspan or migratory behaviour. A broad diversity of butterflies has been observed at artificial light sources. Butterfly species differ in the frequency with which they are reported at light sources on iNaturalist. Natural history traits may be useful in predicting a species' vulnerability to ALAN.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".