How much biotic nativeness matters across human demographic groups
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many central concepts of conservation biology-such as nativeness-are structured by ecological and social factors. However, the social consequences of using these concepts to make conservation decisions remain inadequately understood. Some researchers argue that nativeness, rather than acting as an objective proxy for important ecological relationships, may instead mask social and cultural values about which species belong in a given ecosystem. Yet, even as many non-native species decline, experts often prioritize the conservation of native species. We assessed the perceptions of people (n = 600) in Metro Vancouver, Canada, regarding local declines of native and non-native birds. We measured ecological grief (feelings of loss associated with ecological changes) and loss of cultural ecosystem service (nonmaterial benefits people derive from relationships with nature) associated with documented declines in 2 native and 2 non-native birds. We measured variations in perceptions across differences in nature experiences and sociodemographics. We used a 2-treatment experimental design in which we informed only half the participants about species' nativeness. Perceptions of loss differed among respondents based on their familiarity with birds, experiences with birds, and the native status of the bird. However, the effect of nativeness on feelings of loss was not moderated by ecological knowledge, whether a respondent was an urbanite, or experiences with birds. Instead, race was the strongest moderator of the effect of nativeness on feelings of loss. Only White people reported greater grief for declines in native species than non-native species, even when accounting for education, income, and other variables. Although native status may often be a useful heuristic for inference, relying on it for conservation decision-making may have unintended sociodemographic and equity consequences. Our results also demonstrate how pairing ecological grief and cultural ecosystem service questions with documented ecological declines can elucidate human-nature relationships, such as those between people and non-native birds.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".