COVER-Fish Reference-Update Benchmark

COVER-Fish is a versioned benchmark for studying how reference-corpus updates change a frozen fine-grained recognition system. It preserves immutable source layers, eight gallery states, frozen embeddings, prototype bindings, scoring protocols, transition ledgers and rollback evidence. The record contains the FishBase baseline, the four-round iNaturalist intervention, USFWS, ANGFA, Q-INT and CORE. The large Commons layer and the QT26-QC evaluation roster are issued as companion records. The Commons dependency is bound by its canonical manifest, row-level crosswalk and three licence-tier archive identities rather than an obsolete single-container hash. Level A replay requires only the control and CORE archives and no source pixels or encoder execution. Compact verification supplements map 14 manuscript claims to 169 frozen artifacts across 13 modules, preserve a separately implemented frozen-result audit with 3,639 of 3,639 checks passing, and retain the complete dated pointer-audit receipts. The benchmark reports gains and regressions jointly across source packages, aggregation rules and query domains. Row-level provenance, licence, attribution and content hashes are retained throughout.