Common milkweed gardens increase occupancy by monarch butterflies and other specialist herbivores towards an urban centre
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Specialised species interactions are likely vulnerable to urbanisation because fragmented habitat patches within cities are often smaller and more isolated than natural habitat. As a result, semi‐natural habitat and key resources are sometimes deliberately maintained in cities to support biodiversity (e.g., pollinator gardens), but the effectiveness of these efforts is often unclear. We studied four specialised herbivores (monarch butterflies, milkweed leaf miner flies, milkweed aphids and milkweed weevils) of the ruderal plant common milkweed ( Asclepias syriaca ) to test the predictions that (1) herbivore occupancy of milkweed stands and stems declines towards urban areas and (2) milkweed maintained in urban gardens ameliorates this potentially negative effect of urbanisation. We surveyed 1848 stems in 119 common milkweed stands across an urban–rural gradient in Ontario, Canada, and fit occupancy of stands and individual stems to mixed‐effects models to estimate the effects of urbanisation, stand size and stand type (maintained vs. unmaintained) on milkweed occupancy by the four herbivores. The effects of urbanisation, stand size and type varied among herbivore species. Unexpectedly, stand and stem occupancy by monarchs and leaf miners, and stem occupancy by aphids (but neither for weevils) increased towards urban areas, and the presence of milkweed maintained in urban gardens was largely responsible for this. The presence of maintained common milkweed stands may boost occupancy by several specialist herbivores in urban areas. We recommend encouraging urban residents and municipal organisations to plant and maintain common milkweed and other critical host plants to provide habitat for these specialist herbivores.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 it