When Your Sentinel Protocol Misses Ghost Interactions: Auditing Legacy Ecological Debt
You set up your sentinel protocol six months ago. It's logging interactions — species A touches species B, predator visits site C. But something feels off. The rare frog that should show up during wet season? Nothing. The carrion bird that follows grazing herds? Statistically absent. You're looking at clean data and suspecting it's wrong. Welcome to the ghost interaction problem: events that should be detected but aren't. Legacy ecological debt — the accumulated gap between what your protocol captures and what's actually out there — can silently corrupt everything from habitat models to permit compliance. This isn't about false positives. It's about the ones that never even get a chance to be recorded. Here's how to audit that debt without starting from scratch. Where Ghost Interactions Hit Hardest Real-world scenarios: missed nocturnal pollinators The worst ghost interactions I have seen don't happen in spooky server logs.