Issues in species recovery: an example on the Wyoming toad
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ForumI n a perfect world, recovery programs would have adequate funding, with public and scientific support, and would be built on a foundation of reliable data.In reality, many of these essential ingredients are missing from most recovery programs.For example, the lack of ongoing training to help workers remain abreast of new methods and ideas (Anderson et al. 2003), the appointment of inexperienced personnel to key positions (Reading and Miller 1994), and the lack of coordination among agencies may particularly affect recovery programs.Because recovery programs are often carried out with a thin margin for error, they require strong, qualified leadership with up-to-date knowledge on species and conservation methods.Suggested modifications to the Endangered Species Act, as well as critiques and assessments of recovery plans, have been published since the early 1990s (Tear et al. 1993, Hoekstra et al. 2002).The recovery program for the Wyoming toad (Bufo baxteri) lacks many of the essential ingredients.Because these deficiencies are commonplace, the case of the Wyoming toad provides perspective on other species recovery efforts.I examine the recovery efforts for the Wyoming toad using the framework of critical elements associated with recovery plans for aquatic-breeding amphibians (Semlitsch 2002).I summarize the research undertaken since the toad's listing, highlight the difficulties in building a scientifically based recovery program, and identify unmet challenges in hopes of illuminating some of the problems that arise in species recovery efforts. Recognizing a species in troubleThe Wyoming toad is endemic to the Laramie Plain and was first described by George Baxter in 1946(Porter 1968, Baxter and Stone 1985).This toad, a relic from the retreat of Pleistocene glaciation, has been considered a subspecies of the Canadian toad, Bufo hemiophrys (Porter 1968, Baxter and Stone 1985).However, Wyoming toads are separated from the range of Canadian toads by at least 750 kilometers (km) and are considered a distinct species by Packard (1971), Smith and colleagues (1998), andCrother and colleagues (2000).From their discovery through the early 1970s, Wyoming toads were considered common and abundant within their restricted range (Baxter and Stone 1985), but rapid declines (Baxter and Meyer 1982, Baxter et al. 1984) presaged their likely extinction by the mid-1980s (Lewis et al. 1985.In 1984, the Wyoming toad was listed as endangered (USFWS 1984).A single population of Wyoming toads was discovered in 1987 at Mortenson Lake, in Albany County, Wyoming (Odum and Corn 2005).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".