Establishing and monitoring island breeding colonies to conserve an imperiled lagomorph
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Islands have a long history in species conservation, as they often have fewer predators and competitors than mainland sites. In some instances, islands have been used as breeding colonies to support mainland translocations. In the past decade, 2 islands in New England have been selected to establish island breeding colonies of New England cottontail ( Sylvilagus transitionalis ), a species of conservation concern. The 2 islands, Patience Island and Nomans Land Island National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), were initiated in 2012 and 2019, respectively. Our main objective was to monitor the genetic diversity and population size response of the removal of New England cottontails from Patience Island for translocation to mainland sites. This allowed us to test theoretical predictions about the species' change in genetic diversity over time on an island system. As expected, the mitochondrial DNA haplotype diversity of New England cottontail decreased at a faster rate than their nuclear DNA heterozygosity, the latter remaining stable for over a decade. We also radio‐collared founders released on both islands to estimate their individual survival, which decreased as additional founders were released on Patience Island. We tested the influence of outcrossing parents from different populations on the survival of their released offspring on Patience Island, which had similar survival as offspring with parents from the same population. The survival of Nomans Land Island NWR founders was higher than that of Patience Island founders, likely because of the lack of mammalian predators on Nomans Land Island NWR. Islands have played a critical role in supporting New England cottontail conservation and, in the right circumstances, islands could be used to support the conservation of other lagomorphs of conservation concern. However, careful consideration is needed before an animal is introduced to an island to reduce the possible negative impacts to the island's fauna and flora and maximize the potential success of the island population in supporting the focal species' conservation.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".