Early warning signals do not predict a warming-induced experimental epidemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Climate change can impact the rates at which parasites are transmitted between hosts, ultimately determining if and when an epidemic will emerge. As such, our ability to predict climate-mediated epidemic emergence will become increasingly important in our efforts to prepare for and mitigate the effects of disease outbreaks on ecological systems and global public health. Theory suggests that statistical signatures termed "early warning signals" (EWS), can function as predictors of epidemic emergence. While a number of works report post hoc detections of EWS of epidemic emergence, the theory has yet to be experimentally tested. Here, we analyse experimental and simulated time series of disease spread within populations of the model disease system Daphnia magna-Ordospora colligata for EWS of climate-mediated epidemic emergence. In this system, low temperatures prevent disease emergence, while sufficiently high temperatures force the system through a critical transition to an epidemic state. We found that EWS of epidemic emergence were nearly as likely to be detected in populations maintained at a sub-epidemic temperature as they were to be detected in populations subjected to a warming treatment that induced epidemic spread. Our findings suggest that the detection of false positives may limit the reliability and utility of EWS as predictors of climate-mediated epidemic emergence.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".