Conservation State of the Butterflies of the Caribbean Netherlands
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Butterflies are a colourful component of the biodiversity of the Antilles, and with a total of 12 rangerestricted taxa (species or subspecies "endemic" to a small distributional range that includes one or more of the Caribbean Netherlands), contribute significantly to the islands' status as a planetary hotspot of biodiversity (Myers et al., 2000; Mittermeiers et al., 1999).The biogeography of Antillean butterflies remains an active area of study (e.g., Gemmell et al., 2014, Lalonde et al., 2018), because the largely one-dimensional geographic distribution of the island chain presents a simplified system in which to study processes of dispersal and speciation through time and space (Fontenla, 2003).Butterfly abundance and diversity is highly sensitive to environmental variables such as plant diversity and microhabitats correlated to elevational differences and humidity.Because of this, butterflies may be especially useful as bio-indicator species (Osborne et al., 1999, Miller et al., 2011).In spite (and possibly because) of the fact that many species are endangered and have small population sizes and/or limited distributions, due to a lack of studies, very little is known about the species-specific ecology of most Antillean species.This is a key knowledge gap that may seriously hamper their conservation, not only in the Caribbean Netherlands but in the region as a whole.Table 1 provides a basic list of the species recently documented for the Caribbean Netherlands islands of Bonaire, St.Eustatius and Saba (BES). Characteristics DescriptionOverall, few published studies exist on the butterflies of these islands but several patterns can still be discerned.First is the fact that faunas differ greatly between Bonaire on the one hand and Saba and St. Eustatius jointly on the other hand.For Bonaire in the Leeward Dutch Caribbean and Saba and St.Eustatius in the Windward Dutch Caribbean, it is certain that in pre-colonial times more butterflies of forests and humid habitats (like Heliconiinae, Charaxinae, Papilionidae and Coliadinae) would have been present than are currently documented.The effects of aridification and deforestation has unquestionably taken its toll on all three islands, resulting in a decrease in forest and moist forest habitat and an increase in disturbed and arid habitats.This is certainly reflected in an altered composition of the butterfly faunas on all three islands.For St. Eustatius, the only island for which significant quantitative sampling has been done, Pieridae were the most numerically abundant group of butterflies (48%), followed by Lycaenidae (26%) and Hesperiidae (12%) and smaller numbers of both Heliconiinae (6%) and Charaxinae (5%) (Debrot et al., 2020).This differs significantly from the trademark faunal characteristics of the Antilles which have an overall notably higher contribution of species from the Papilionidae, Coliadinae, and Nymphalinae families than continental South America.However, clearly St. Eustatius (as well as Saba) is largely missing these typical West-Indian butterfly families (Debrot et al., 2020).As for Bonaire, its fauna is a reduced subset of the fauna documented from Curaao (Debrot et al., 1999, Debrot and Miller, 2004, Miller et al., 2003).This means that if forest restoration occurs on Bonaire, many of the butterflies now only known for Curaao may be able to re-settle successfully on Bonaire.Additional expected species for Bonaire (upon further study but especially if vegetation recovery occurs) are any of the following 22 species already known from the most nearby butterfly source-State of Nature Report for the Caribbean Netherlands, 2024: a second 6-year assessment of the Conservation State, threats and management implications for habitats and species in the Caribbean Netherlands.
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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 | 0.000 | 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