Threatened or thriving? Q methodology reveals stakeholder discourses of bats in an insular context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bats are the only indigenous mammals on Reunion Island, with one of the three species, Mormopterus francoismoutoui, being endemic, and another, Pteropus niger, endangered. The endemic bat is highly adapted to urban areas and coexists in proximity to humans, living in large colonies in rooftops of houses, schools, and churches, and also under bridges. These bats hold considerable importance for Reunion Island’s natural heritage, but at the same time, they carry diseases and leave dejections that can cause olfactory discomfort and respiratory problems. As conservation and management measures hold profound implications on both human and bat populations, we need to foster a proper understanding of stakeholder perspectives and find common ground. We applied Q methodology to explore stakeholder discourses of bats on Reunion Island, focusing on aspects of conservation, management, and public health. Our combined quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed three principal discourses. The human-oriented discourse advocates public education and addressing myths and misconceptions to protect bats. The nature-oriented discourse prioritizes the protection of natural habitats to conserve bats. The public health and policy-oriented discourse seeks to adapt bat conservation and management policies to ensure public health safety. All stakeholders agreed that there is a lack of awareness among local media, which at times diffuses sensational and erroneous information, and that as well there is a need to integrate research output into public outreach efforts to garner interest in bats. These results can aid in contextualizing conservation actions and policies and could potentially provide sustainable management solutions to human-bat coexistence on Reunion Island.
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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 | 0.036 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".