Issues in species recovery: an example on the Wyoming toad
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The identification and recovery of endangered species is difficult because of their rarity, the continuing threats to their survival, and inadequate funding for research and conservation. There have been some success stories, but also a number of failures. Have biologists learned from our failures, or are we repeating the same mistakes? While habitat availability and cost are important limitations to species recovery, other, more easily addressed issues also hamper recovery programs. The Wyoming toad (Bufo baxteri) is an endangered species whose recovery has been stalled by problems that are common to species recovery efforts, especially for animals without significant “charisma.” I summarize the research undertaken on the Wyoming toad since its listing, highlight the difficulties in building a scientifically based recovery program, and identify some of the unmet challenges impeding recovery. Although specific to the Wyoming toad, these recommendations are relevant to recovery programs facing similar issues.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".